Investment-based asset pricing research highlights the role of irreversibility as a determinant of firms' risk and expected return. In a neoclassical model of a firm with costly scale adjustment options, we show that the effect of scale flexibility (i.e., contraction and expansion options) is to...

This paper examines how accounting transparency and corporate governance interact. Firms with better governance are associated with higher abnormal returns, but even more so if they also have higher transparency. The effect is largely monotonic — it is small and insignificant for opaque firms...

Firms' inflexibility to adjust their scale persistently explains capital structure variations in a comprehensive sample and randomly-selected sub-samples. Higher inflexibility leads to lower financial leverage, potentially due to higher default risk and lower value of tax shields. Contraction...

We study how transparency affects takeover probability and stock returns. If transparency helps acquiring firms to determine target value or synergy, then it can increase takeover vulnerability. Estimated takeover probabilities produce results consistent with this view and offer better fit over...

A standard real options model predicts a strong positive interaction effect between research and development (R&D) investment and product market competition. R&D-intensive firms tend to be riskier and earn higher expected returns than R&D-weak firms, particularly in competitive industries. Also,...

We examine the effect of labor mobility on venture capital (VC) investment. Following the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine that restricts labor mobility, VCs are less likely to invest in affected states. This effect is more pronounced when human capital is more important...