We hypothesize that the root cause of many goodwill write-offs - managers' public admission of ill-advised corporate acquisitions - is the overpriced shares of buyers at acquisition. Overpriced shares provide managers with strong incentives to invest, and particularly to acquire businesses, even...

This brief case asks students to assess the impact of an acquisition on the valuation of a company's net operating losses. Specifically, students assess whether an article discussing Alcatel S.A. 's acquisition of Lucent has assessed the correct value of Lucent's net operating losses. The case...

This paper proposes a real options model of mergers and acquisitions motivated by synergies between two companies. We investigate the minimum synergies required to conduct the merger and how the balance between cash and shares as media of exchange affect this outcome. Based on this analysis we...

This paper offers an alternative method for estimating expected returns. The proposed reward beta approach performs well empirically and is based on asset pricing theory. The empirical section compares this approach with the CAPM and the Fama-French three-factor model. In out of sample testing,...

We hypothesize that supply and demand shifts occurred in the US venture capital (VC) industry during 1980 to 2002 and present the results of an empirical study about the temporal characteristics of the industry during that period. Our main conclusion is that the VC industry has gone under...

I consider the effects of entrepreneurial inequity-aversion on financial contracting with a self-interested venture capitalist, in a single-sided and double-sided moral hazard setting. In the pure principal-agent model, as the proportion of self-interested entrepreneurs in the population...

This paper proposes an explanation for two empirical puzzles surrounding initial public offerings (IPOs). Firstly, it is well documented that IPO underpricing increases during quot;hot issuequot; periods. Secondly, venture capital (VC) backed IPOs are less underpriced than non venture capital...

We study signaling equilibria at the IPO when owners determine not only the price at which to sell primary equity but also the amount of investment proceeds to raise. This implies owners have a choice of two signals at the IPO, i.e., investment oriented signaling and underpricing. We show that...

A new relationship is derived for net present value (NPV) per dollar invested that is composed entirely of interest rates. The rates are mark-ups to the cost of capital, each mark-up being an internal rate of return (IRR) embedded in the complex plane. The result has been shown before, but only...