With the arrival of the new millennium, many industries across the developed economies are increasingly facing volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environments-often characterized as VUCA-caused by a host of disruptive factors hyper-competition, globalized value chains,...

The average Equity Premium or Market Risk Premium (MRP) used in 2011 by professors for the USA (5.7%) is higher than the one used by analysts (5.0%) and companies (5.6%). The standard deviation of the MRP used in 2011 by analysts (1.1%) is lower than the ones of companies (2.0%) and professors...

Research Summary: Firm size has long been recognized as a source of competitive advantage. However, the disruptions arising from the knowledge-based global economy are decoupling the link between firm size and profitability. We demonstrate in this article, the structural shifts and evolving...

We look at the Risk-Free Rate (RF) and the Market Risk Premium (MRP) used by analysts in 2015 to value companies of six countries. The dispersion of both, the RF and the MRP used, is huge, and the most unexpected result is that the dispersion is higher for the RF than for the MRP.We also find...

The winner-takes-all business model followed by many U.S. Internet firms predicts that spending on intangibles will exhibit increasing profitability returns-to-scale. That is, larger expenditures should be more profitable per dollar of investment than small expenditures because larger...

As U.S. corporate profit margins have made it to record highs, a debate has raged between those who place their hopes on a new paradigm of sustained high profits and those who believe in capitalism's efficiency and the tendency of margins to revert to the mean. Using a bottoms-up analysis...

Managers would like to understand which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments, and researchers are just beginning to explore this issue. Which strategies are useful and which are not? In a step towards answering this question, we estimate the impacts of several competitive...

We explore the relationship between managerial incentives and environmental harm. We find that high-powered executive compensation packages can increase the odds of environmental law-breaking by 40-60% and the magnitude of environmental harm by over 100%. We document similar results for the...

This study examines whether and how the terms of CEO compensation contracts at large, publicly traded commercial banks between 1994 and 2006 influenced, and were influenced by, the risk-profiles of these firms. We find evidence linking contractual risk-taking incentives, which we proxy with...

We investigate whether the flexibility in making contributions towards defined benefit pension plans sponsored by firms in the United States allows managers to save cash and increase investments. Firms invest more at higher levels of pension deficit, defined as pension benefit obligations less...