Corporate Finance

We study economies of asymmetric information with observable types. Trade takes place in lotteries. Individuals face a standard budget constraint, while the incentive compatibility constraints are imposed on the production set of the intermediaries. This formalization encompasses moral hazard and private information economies. Equilibrium allocations are constrained efficient, but, contrary to what stated for example in Jerez (2005), the set of equilibrium allocations may be empty and the Second Welfare Theorem may fail. This happens for two reasons.

International Financial Management seamlessly blends theory with the analysis of data, examples, and practical case situations. Overall, Bekaert and Hodrick equips future business leaders with the analytical tools they need to understand the issues, make sound international financial decisions, and manage the risks that businesses may face in today"s competitive global environment.

All data in this edition has been updated to reflect the most recent information, including coverage on the latest research, global financial crisis, and emerging markets.

We present a novel linear program for the approximation of the dynamic programming cost-to-go function in high- dimensional stochastic control problems. LP approaches to approximate DP have typically relied on a natural “projection” of a well-studied linear program for exact dynamic programming. Such programs restrict attention to approximations that are lower bounds to the optimal cost-to-go function.

This paper discusses some existing and potential roles of financial reporting disclosures. The focus is on what are conventionally termed mandatory disclosures, although as Sunder (1997) points out the distinction between mandatory and voluntary is somewhat arbitrary. The paper views disclosure through the lens of incentives. Accounting disclosures are a component of the broad set of information shareholders, debt holders, and other accountees have to assess the stewardship of accountors.

We develop an incomplete-markets q-theoretic model to study entrepreneurship dynamics. Precautionary motive, borrowing constraints, and capital illiquidity lead to underinvestment, conservative debt use, under-consumption, and less risky portfolio allocation. The endogenous liquid wealth-illiquid capital ratio w measures time-varying financial constraint. The option to accumulate wealth before entry is critical for entrepreneurship. Flexible exit option is important for risk management purposes.

Government officials, policy analysts, practitioners, and academics from diverse perspectives across the globe have enthusiastically endorsed the promise of public-private engagement to solve pressing problems of public policy.  The endorsement often is a rallying cry for a change in policy or reform of a prevailing policy regime.  In theory and practice, the idea of public-private (PP) blurs prevailing distinctions between roles and actions traditionally considered properly “public” and those roles and actions conventionally considered properly “private.”  It signifies a shi

This paper compares accounting and finance approaches to equity valuation, with a focus on practical investing. It shows how the two endeavors tie to the same theoretical foundation so they have the potential of being unified. Finance has largely focused on the "denominator" aspect of valuation— the discount rate—under the mantra of "asset pricing" while accounting has largely focused on the numerator; specifying the expected accounting outcomes to be discounted. The paper shows how both accounting and finance can be unified to resolve both the numerator and denominator issue in valuation.

A set of recent papers attempts to explain the size and book-to-market anomalies with conditional CAPM or CCAPM models with economically motivated conditioning variables, or with factor models with economically motivated factors. The tests of these models, as presented, fail to reject the proposed model. We argue that these tests fail to reject the null hypothesis because they have very low statistical power against what we call the characteristics alternative.

Price momentum strategies have historically generated high positive returns with little systematic risk. However, these strategies also experience infrequent but severe losses. During 13 of the 978 months in our 1929–2010 sample, losses to a US-equity momentum strategy exceed 20 percent per month. We demonstrate that a hidden Markov model in which the market moves between latent "turbulent" and "calm" states in a systematic stochastic manner captures these high-loss episodes.