This paper considers the effect of competition for scarce financial resources on managers' incentives to generate profitable investment opportunities. Competition is only unambiguously beneficial if projects are symmetric. If divisions differ in their cash endowments or their growth potential,...

In an internal capital market, individual departments may compete for a share of the firm's budget by engaging in wasteful influence activities. We show that firms with more levels of hierarchy may experience lower influence costs than less hierarchical firms, even though the former provide more...

This paper provides a theory of integration based on the inability of parties to write comprehensive financial contracts. In our model, integration comes with both benefits and costs. On the one hand, integration entails liquidity spillovers from high- to low-return projects, implying that...

Hierarchy can function as an instrument to channel influence activities or power struggles in organizations. Contrary to what has frequently been argued, we show that multi-divisional organizations may involve lower influence costs than single-tier organizations, even though they offer more...

We examine the role of optimal security design when lenders make inefficient accept or reject decisions after screening projects. Lenders may be either quot;too conservativequot;, in which case they reject positive-NPV projects. Or they may be quot;too aggressivequot;, in which case they accept...

We study optimal financial contracting for centralized and decentralized firms. Under centralized contracting headquarters raises funds on behalf of multiple projects and subsequently allocates the funds on the firm's internal capital market. Under decentralized contracting each project raises...

We model negotiations over patent royalties in the shadow of litigation through a Nash-in-Nash approach, where outside options, triggered in case of disagreement, are derived from a subsequent game of litigation. The outcome of litigation depends both on "hard determinants", such as relative...

We offer a theory of the "boundary of the firm" tailored to banks as it builds on a single risk-shifting inefficiency and takes into account interbank lending, as an alternative to integration, and insured deposit financing. It explains why deeper economic integration should cause also greater,...

In antitrust cases as well as for regulated industries, the question of how to treat indirect constraint and captive sales correctly has become of major importance in Europe. The (im-)proper treatment of indirect constraints has lead the CFI to overturn the Commission's decision in the proposed...

Why do retail investors trade? To analyze the impact of professional advice on trading, we combine administrative and survey data from a large German bank. Investors who report that they always rely on their advisor's recommendations have a 25-percent-higher trading volume. Also, for investors...