Whereas Poterba and Summers (1995) find that firms use hurdle rates that are unrelated to their CAPM betas, Graham and Harvey (2001) find that 74% of their survey firms use the CAPM for capital budgeting. We provide an explanation for these two apparently contradictory conclusions. We find that...

Whereas Poterba and Summers (1995) find that firms use hurdle rates that are unrelated to their CAPM betas, Graham and Harvey (2001) find that 74% of their survey firms use the CAPM for capital budgeting. We provide an explanation for these two apparently contradictory conclusions. We find that...

Empirical studies of firms' financing, investment, and payout policies routinely examine these policies in isolation. In this paper we develop a dynamic multi-equation model where firms make financing and investment decisions jointly subject to the constraint that sources of cash must equal uses...

We develop a dynamic multi-equation model where firms make financing and investment decisions jointly subject to the constraint that sources must equal uses of cash. We argue that static models of financial decisions produce inconsistent coefficient estimates and that models that do not...

We survey a cross-section of 127 companies to gain insight on various dimensions of firms' investment decisions. The questions posed by our survey address the hurdle rates firms use, calculations of project-related cashflows, and the interaction of cashflows and hurdle rates. Unlike previous...

We find that operational constraints lead firms to use high discount rates that exceed their cost of financial capital, based on an original survey of CFOs with firm identifiers linked to responses. Firms with abundant access to capital but limited qualified management or manpower appear to...

In 1993 and early 1994, Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold (FCX), a mining company, issued two series of gold-denominated depositary shares to raise 430 million dollars expanding their mining capacity in Indonesia. We price the depositary shares using a term structure model for the forward rates...

Although the choice of an IPO offer price level would seem to have little economic significance, firms do not decide this arbitrarily. Our findings suggest that firms select their IPO offer prices to target a desired ownership structure, which in turn has implications for underpricing and...

We examine the "marketability hypothesis," which states that stock splits enhance the attractiveness of shares to investors by restoring prices to a preferred trading range. We examine splits of mutual fund shares because they provide a clean testing ground for the marketability hypothesis,...