This paper considers a setting in which managers have private information about the values of their firms and can communicate it to uninformed investors through the use of two signals: capital structure and inventory accounting method. We show conditions under which a separating equilibrium with...

On February 9,1982, Hammermill Paper registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to swap as many as 400,000 common shares for $13.4 million of the company's 8.07% promissory notes due February 1, 1997. The resulting swap increased Hammermill's 1st quarter earnings by $3.7 million,...

We explain the puzzling empirical evidence on the investory accounting choice through a management signaling argument. We assert that firms with lower nominal production costs than other firms have relatively less to gain from the tax advantages assocaited with LIFO adoption. For these firms,...

We develop a real options model of R&D valuation that takes into account the uncertainty in the quality (or efficacy) of the research output, the time and cost to completion, and the market demand for the R&D output. The model is then applied to study the problem of pharmaceutical...