An empirical model of managers' demand for agency goods is derived and estimated using the Almost Ideal Demand System of Deaton and Muellbauer (AER 1980). As in Jensen and Meckling (JFE 1976), we derive managers' demand for agency goods by maximizing a managerial utility function where managers...

By eliminating the influence of statistical noise, stochastic frontier techniques permit the estimation of the best-practice value of a firm's investment opportunities and the magnitude of a firm's systematic failure to achieve its best-practice market value – a gauge of the magnitude of...

We develop a novel technique to decompose banks' ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans into three components: first, a minimum ratio that represents best-practice lending given the volume and composition of a bank's loans, the average contractual interest rate charged on these loans, and...