This study focuses on the impact of the 2001 recession as well as the subsequent expansion on U.S. trade (i.e., retail and wholesale) firms' short-term assets and liabilities. The paper also analyzes the differential effects on long-term debt and cash flow levels between retail and wholesale...

Corporate managers tend to preserve cash with an expectation of a worse economy while spend cash to exercise growth opportunities with a favorable economic condition. We hypothesize that there exists a real option component of aggregate corporate cash holdings, serving both functions of...

Financial statements and an accompanying NPV calculation are embedded into a binomial tree. This generalization of traditional static NPV analysis allows the financial statements to both evolve through time and, at any given time, to vary with states of the world (similar to a Monte Carlo...

We study when and why firms exercise real options. Using detailed project-level investment data, we find that the likelihood that a firm exercises a real option is strongly related to peer exercise behavior. Peer exercise decisions are as important in explaining exercise behavior as variables...

Firms obtain noisy estimates of investors' required rates of return (discount rates) using market-based information. Discounted-cash-flow (DCF) methods, as commonly taught in MBA courses, lead to upward-biased estimates of project values in the presence of such noise, even when cash flow and...

In this paper we show the advantages of staged investments for venture capitalists. We develop an option-pricing model that enables to evaluate the flexibility acquired by a venture capitalist when he stages his investment process. Instead of investing a fixed amount at the beginning of the...

The recent economic downturn of 2007-2008 has brought renewed focus on working capital policies. In this paper we examine the role of business cycles on the working capital-profitability relationship using a sample of Finnish listed companies over an 18 year period. We find the impact of...

We show that economic conditions when managers enter the labor market have long-run effects on their career paths and managerial styles. Managers who began their careers during recessions become CEOs more quickly, but at smaller firms. They also have more conservative styles, such as lower...