We examine the effects of a variety of mandatory information disclosure regimes on the expected revenues of issuing firms and on their endogenously-arising incentives for financial innovation. The main question we ask is: what kind of information and how much of it should firms be asked to...

We develop an economic theory of “flexibility”, which we interpret as the discretion orability to make a decision that others disagree with. We show that flexibility is essentiallyan option for the decisionmaker, and can be valued as such. The value of the flexibilityoption is decreasing in...

In this paper we introduce flexibility as an economic concept and apply it to the firm’ssecurity issuance decision and capital structure choice. Flexibility is the ability to makedecisions that one thinks are best even when others disagree. The firm’s management valuesflexibility because it...