An underinvestment problem arises if an additional investment project with positive net presentvalue increases only the market value of debt, but not of equity. As a way out the shift ofthe additional investment project and possibly also other projects to a subsidiary is considered.From the...

The value of a firm's securities measures the value of the firm's productive assets. If the assets include only capital goods and not a permanent monopoly franchise, the value of the securities measures the value of the capital. Finally, if the price of the capital can be measured or inferred,...

Recent studies have shown that the dynamics of firms (growth, job reallocation, and exit) are negatively correlated with the initial size of the firm and its age. In this paper we analyze whether financial factors, in addition to technological differences, are important in generating these...

How do investors respond to predictable shifts in profitability? We consider how demographic shifts affect profits and returns across industries. Cohort size fluctuations produce forecastable demand changes for age-sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicycles, beer, life insurance, and nursing...

The paper develops a theory of ownership structure based on the notion that corporate control and secondary market liquidity are not perfectly compatible with eath other. We analyze the tradeoff between these two objectives for two different ownership structures: the privately held firm, which...

We use investment-cash flow regressions to show that both asymmetric-information and agency problems are more severe in Continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon countries leading to too little investment by firms with attractive investment opportunities and too much by those with poor...

This paper shows that combining an upper constraint on dividends, a lower constraint on dividends due to shareholder preferences, and an interest rate that increases with the debt ratio leads to a pecking-order financial structure: A typical firm will start to finance a new investment by issuing...

The economic transformations taking place in Poland in recent years have been accompanied by changes in companies’ structure. The role of small companies, employing up to 50 persons, has been constantly growing. These companies, particularly in the first half of the 1990s, helped to reduce...

The basic financial purpose of a firm is to maximize its value. An inventory management system should also contribute to realization of this basic aim. Many current asset management models currently found in financial management literature were constructed with the assumption of book profit...

Using data for publicly traded companies from the UK and two transition countries, the Czech Republic and Poland, we analyze the relationship between ownership concentratio and performance while also accounting for the effect of hostile takeover threats on this relationship. Some argue that...