The owners of undeveloped urban land are often blamed for restricting housing supply and thereby driving up house prices in the face of increasing demand. This paper shows how greater intra-city variation in amenity values reduces competition between developers and makes delaying development...

We show how directors can set the strength of a firm's anti-takeover provisions in order to influence the investment-timing decision of a future empire-building CEO. The prospect of future hostile takeover attempts, which terminate the CEO's control benefits if successful, affects the CEO's...

Investments in climate-change adaptation will have to be made while the extent of climate change is uncertain. However, some important sources of uncertainty will fall over time as more climate data become available. This paper investigates the effect on optimal investment decision-making of...

Regulated firms are exposed to asset-stranding risk whenever allowed revenue depends on past capital expenditure: if demand falls far enough, past expenditure is unrecoverable. I show that such regulation induces firms to invest in more capital, but distorts the trade-off between investment...

Share buybacks reduce taxes, commit managers to pay out free cash-flow, and send positive signals to investors. This paper shows that they also transfer wealth from shareholders to the owners of employee stock options and that this transfer increases the price needed to induce shareholders to...

This paper presents a model of investment in a duopoly with firms that choose the scale and timing of investment. Decision-making flexibility and the costs saved by investing in large steps rather than sequences of small steps determine an incumbent's ability to deter entry by a potential...

This paper presents a model of a firm that backdates the granting of executive stock options in order to maximize actual compensation for a given level of reported compensation. The model is used to estimate the magnitude of the difference between the actual and reported values of option grants....

Most applications of real options analysis assume a single decision-maker uses flexibility to maximize a firm's market value. This paper presents an alternative approach suitable for firms with two utility-maximizing decision-makers who have joint responsibility for setting firm policies. In...

Commodities are physical, not financial, assets. We investigate the effects on equilibrium spot-price behavior of frictions in the storage process, which introduce an element of irreversibility to storage decisions and lead to periods when storage operators do not trade in the spot market. We...

In this paper we develop a new approach to understanding the behavior of high frequency electricity spot prices. It treats electricity delivered at different times of the day as different commodities, while recognizing that these commodities may be traded on a small number of intra-day markets....