hedging and liquidity this article develops a model for evaluating alternative hedging strategies for financially constrained firms a key advantage of the model is the ability to capture the intertemporal effects of hedging on the firm s financial situation we characterize the optimal hedge a wide range of alternative hedging strategies can be specified and the model allows us to determine in each case if the hedging strategy raises or lowers firm value and by how much we show that hedging firm value hedging cash flow from operations and hedging sales revenue are not optimal the article highlights the fact that every hedging strategy comes packaged with a borrowing strategy which requires careful consideration futures markets often provide the most liquid and convenient instruments for managing risk however because futures contracts are marked to market it is often impossible to simultaneously hedge cash flows and values for example a futures contract that locked in the value of gold that a corporation planned to extract in one year would generate an uncertain cash flow pattern over the year this article examines how liquidity and cash flow timing problems associated with different hedging strategies can affect a firm s value in our model the objective for hedging is to increase the firm s financial flexibility an optimal hedge maximizes the firm s liquidityslack in the form of excess cash or unused debt capacitywhen liquidity is most valuable this lowers the danger of costly financial distress reduces the effective cost of external financial constraints and makes value maximizing investments affordable a firm with no financial constraints does not gain from hedging and the higher the firm s financial constraints the greater the potential value of hedging the value of hedging depends critically on the design of the hedging strategy we show that the optimal hedge minimizes the variability in the marginal value of the firm s cash balances such a hedge efficiently redistributes cash balances across different states and periods taking cash from those states for which the marginal cost of the financial constraint is low and giving cash to those states for which the marginal

military expenditure and the restructuring of capitalism the military industry in britain the character of the british defence industry since the 1940s has reflected a regime of accumulation which was shaped by both fordism and the cold war the decline of both these influences means that the political economy of defence spending and the internal organization of the defence industry are changing while the outbreak of peace in europe should lead to some reduction in defence spending on cold war items the world s arms industry is not about to disappear the global arms industry remains huge and is increasing beyond the control of individual national governments the concentration of capital and intensified search for markets is likely to increase the volatility of the industry and affect individual companies and nations with varying results britain may remain disproportionately important in the new military economy copyright 1990 by oxford university press

excess capacity cyclical production and merger motives some evidence from the capital markets the theoretical foundations of merger are weak and ad hoc however recent advances in the theory of the firm pave the way for a construct that may help alleviate this problem the purpose of this article is to explore the theory of cost in search of a stronger though not necessarily general theory of merger firms sometimes face demand insufficient to support production at the cost minimizing rate they respond by producing more slowly and periodically idling their facilities 2 this implies that intermittent excess capacity might prompt a firm to expand its product line through merger to reduce idle capacity and minimize production costs in this article we present evidence that these cost related issues are an empirically important motive for merger differentiating between so called cost based and monopoly mergers presents a problem of considerable magnitude for antitrust law enforcement authorities 3 potentially a means of acquiring market power merger

an empirical investigation of u s firms in reorganization the purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of chapter 11 from an empirical examination of thirty firms that have emerged from reorganization we find the recontracting framework of chapter 11 to be complex lengthy and costly violations of absolute priority in favor of stockholders are frequently encountered these deviations may result from the bargaining process of chapter 11 or from a recontracting process between creditors and stockholders which recognizes the ability of stockholder oriented management to preserve firm value an example of such recontracting addresses myers underinvestment problem an investigation of the effects of chapter 11 on the pricing of risky debt is also provided the purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of chapter

capital budgeting for interrelated projects a real options approach this paper explores the effect of project interrelationships on investment decisions and project values in a real options framework we examine in detail the mutually exclusive case where a firm may invest in the development stage of two projects and then may select only a single project to implement the firm can develop the projects in parallel or in sequence the choice of development policy depends on the relative values of the embedded options for each strategy sequential development is shown to be superior to parallel development when projects have highly correlated values and when they require a large commitment of capital for development are short term in nature and have relatively low volatility we also show that the optimal ordering of sequential projects does not always begin with the most profitable project

the production and inventory behavior of the american automobile industry understanding inventory movements is central to an understanding of business cycles this paper presents an empirical study of the behavior of inventories in the automobile industry it finds that inventory behavior is well explained by the assumption of intertemporal optimization with rational expectations the underlying cost structure appears to have substantial costs of changing production as well as substantial costs of being away from target inventory thelatter being a function of current sales given this cost structure whether inventory behavior is stabilizing or destabilizing depends on the characteristics of the demand process in the automobile industry inventory behavior is destabilizing the variance of production is larger than the variance of sales

the pecking order debt capacity and information asymmetry abstract we quantify the empirical relevance of the pecking order hypothesis using a novel empirical model and testing strategy that addresses statistical power concerns with previous tests while the classificatory ability of the pecking order varies significantly depending on whether one interprets the hypothesis in a strict or liberal e g modified pecking order manner the pecking order is never able to accurately classify more than half of the observed financing decisions however when we expand the model to incorporate factors typically attributed to alternative theories the predictive accuracy of the model increases dramatically accurately classifying over 80 of the observed debt and equity issuances finally we show that what little pecking order behavior can be found in the data is driven more by incentive conflicts as opposed to information asymmetry

misspecification of capital asset pricing this study documents empirical anomalies which suggest that either the simple one period capital asset pricing model capm is misspecified or that capital markets are inefficient in particular portfolios based on firm size or earnings price e p ratios experience average returns systematically different from those predicted by the capm furthermore the abnormal returns persist for at least two years this persistence reduces the likelihood that these results are being generated by a market inefficiency rather the evidence seems to indicate that the equilibrium pricing model is misspecified however the data also reveals that an e p effect does not emerge after returns are controlled for the firm size effect the firm size effect largely subsumes the e p effect thus while the e p anomaly and value anomaly exist when each variable is considered separately the two anomalies seem to be related to the same set of missing factors and these factors appear to be more closely associated with firm size than e p ratios

optimal security design and dynamic capital structure in a continuous time agency model we derive the optimal dynamic contract in a continuous time principal agent setting and implement it with a capital structure credit line long term debt and equity over which the agent controls the payout policy while the project s volatility and liquidation cost have little impact on the firm s total debt capacity they increase the use of credit versus debt leverage is nonstationary and declines with past profitability the firm may hold a compensating cash balance while borrowing at a higher rate through the credit line surprisingly the usual conflicts between debt and equity asset substitution strategic default need not arise in this paper we consider a dynamic contracting environment in which a riskneutral agent or entrepreneur with limited resources manages an investment activity while the investment is profitable it is also risky and in the short run it can generate arbitrarily large operating losses the agent will need outside financial support to cover such losses and continue the project the difficulty is that while the probability distribution of the cash flows is publicly known the agent may distort these cash flows by taking a hidden action that leads to a private benefit specifically the agent may i conceal and divert cash flows for his own consumption and or ii stop providing costly effort which would reduce the mean of the cash flows therefore from the perspective of the principal or investors that fund the project there is the concern that a low cash flow realization may be a result of the agent s actions rather than the project s fundamentals to provide the agent with appropriate incentives investors control the agent s wage and may also withdraw their financial support for the project and force its early termination we seek to characterize an optimal contract in this framework and relate it to the firm s choice of capital structure we develop a method to solve for the optimal contract given the incentive constraints in a continuous time setting and study the properties of the credit line debt and equity that implement the contract as in the discrete time model of demarzo and fishman 2003 the continuous time setting offers several peter m demarzo is from stanford university and yuliy sannikov is from u c berkeley we

estimation of the depreciation rate of physical and r d capital in the u s total manufacturing sector i introduction numerous studies on production and cost the sources of productivity and endogenous growth have recognized the pivotal role of the physical capital stock studies at various levels of aggregation over assets and industries have emphasized the crucial role of investment in plant and equipment in the growth of demand and productive capacity it is clearly recognized by economists and policymakers that knowledge capital approximated by rd 1986 to measure the depreciation rates of the stock of rd 1980 in the literature on dynamic demand models such an approach was first adopted by epstein and denny 1980 and more recently by kollintzas and choi 1985 for a single capital good and on a theoretical level in bernstein and nadiri 1987a 1987b the paper is organized as follows the specification of the model is presented in section ii section iii is devoted to a discussion of the data and to the presentation of the parameter estimates of the model in section iv we present the empirical results for the depreciation rates for physical and r d capital and compare them with those reported in the literature we compare the physical capital stock estimates generated by our model with the official capital stock estimates produced by u s department of commerce bureau of economic analysis in this section we also present our estimates of the decomposition of gross investment into replacement and expansion investment for both physical and r d capital these decompositions are important from the vantage point of public policy analysis

the economic consequences of reduced uk military expenditure the last few years have seen a variety of proposals for uk disarmament for a re orientation of defence policy towards a less expensive non nuclear stance more commen surate with britain s present economic position in the world unfortunately these proposals become suddenly coy and tentative as they approach the economic implications of their programme in complete contrast to the detailed quantitative calculations they pro vide for other aspects the alternative defence commission 1983 and prins 1983 are typical examples of this the difficulties this lacuna creates are illustrated by the ordeal the labour party faced in the 1983 election campaign they advocated it appears a reduc tion of british defence expenditure which now accounts for just over 5 of gdp to about the european average of around 3 5 but they proved unable to counter the claim of the conservative defence secretary mr heseltine that this policy would cost 400 000 jobs 1 the hesitancy with which proponents of reductions in military expenditure approach the economic consequences is surprising given the near unanimity in the technical litera ture two major studies in the uk eiu 1963 and brown 1964 studies in the us leontief 1965 and a recent survey kennedy 1983 all indicate that disarmament represents an economic opportunity rather than an economic problem nonetheless the tenor of the recent policy literature suggests that it would be useful to provide a detailed assessment of the economic consequences of a reduction in uk military expenditure from 5 to 3 5 of gdp since the results obtained below are broadly in line with those of the studies cited above the contribution of this paper does not lie in the novelty of its conclusion rather it provides a detailed quantitative review of the economic issues cur rently involved in a transition to lower levels of military expenditure since there is a wide literature already available which provides arguments to suggest that such a transition could provide real security benefits the strategic aspects will only be mentioned in passing d smith 1980 and alternative defence commission 1983 provide detail on this

assessing the regional economic impacts of defense activities a survey of methods defense activities exercised in a specific region may alter the region s economic performance an accurate assessment of the potential economic impacts of defense activities is a valuable undertaking to enable regional planners to prepare for changes the variety in the methods among others input output models economic base models keynesian regional multipliers fixed effects estimators and case study approaches inspired by geography sociology and political science can pose a dilemma we detail the historical and theoretical background of each method as well as select exemplary cases where these methods were applied by examining old and new methods we aim to construct a typology that could be valuable to all stakeholders in this sense defense economics can also contribute to the allied social sciences by outlining evaluation methods that may be applicable to other fields

diversification and cash dynamics abstract why do diversified firms hold significantly less cash than focused firms we study this question using a dynamic model of corporate investment saving and diversification decisions we find that investment dynamics are more important in explaining the cash differences than financing frictions more efficient internal capital markets increase cash differences and are especially valuable when a firm diversifies or refocuses contrary to static models more diverse conglomerates have lower cash differences endogenous selection diversifying firms are larger and have better growth opportunities accounts for 68 of the cash difference and the diversification event itself reduces cash holdings by 32

the political economy of military expenditure an introduction this paper shows that although the military burden has declined since the korean war in the oecd it still represents an important component of government spending the magnitude of military spending does not provide a measure of its importance to the economy the relation between military spending and accumulation has to be seen as a complex historical dialectical process in which military spending plays a contradictory role the other contributions to the symposium are then discussed within this framework they deal with the empirical analysis of the economic costs of military spending the impact of changing military spending and the problems of conversion copyright 1990 by oxford university press

target behavior and financing how conclusive is the evidence the notion that firms have a debt ratio target that is a primary determinant of financing behavior is influential in finance yet how definitive is the evidence we address this issue by generating samples where financing is unrelated to a firm s current debt ratio or a target we find that much of the available evidence in favor of target behavior based on leverage ratio changes can be reproduced for these samples taken together our findings suggest that a number of existing tests of target behavior have no power to reject alternatives

corporate liquidity and capital structure we solve for a firm s optimal cash holding policy within a continuous time contingent claims framework using dividends short term borrowing and equity issues as controls assuming mean reversion of earnings optimal cash is non monotone in business conditions and increasing in the level of long term debt the model matches closely a wide range of empirical benchmarks and predicts cash and leverage dynamics in line with the empirical literature firm value is quite insensitive to changes in the level of long term debt the model has interesting implications for asset substitution hedging and pecking order growth opportunities do not greatly affect cash holding policy

the corporate propensity to save why do corporations accumulate liquid assets we show theoretically that intertemporal trade offs between interest income taxation and the cost of external finance determine optimal savings intriguingly we find that controlling for tobin s q saving and cash flow are negatively related because firms lower cash reserves to invest after receiving positive cash flow shocks and vice versa consistent with theory we estimate negative propensities to save out of cash flow we also find that income uncertainty affects saving more than do external finance constraints therefore contrary to previous evidence saving propensities reflect too many forces to be used to measure external finance constraints

conversion policy in the uk the democratization of eastern europe the disintegration of the warsaw pact the proposed strategic arms reduction talks start and the conventional forces in europe cfe agreements are concrete evidence of the end to the cold war for nato these events have precipitated an overhaul of strategic policies resulting in major cutbacks in the defence budgets of member states in the u k this has given rise to a growing debate on the economic effects of cuts in the military burden and the possible benefits to be derived from what has become popularly labelled the peace dividend however the way in which resources are transformed for the military into civil use and the interpretation of the objectives of the conversion process lie at the centre of a controversy about the optimal use of the peace dividend this paper provides a critical assessment of the contributions to this debate copyright 1990 by oxford university press

term structures of credit spreads with incomplete accounting information we study the implications of imperfect information for term structures of credit spreads on corporate bonds we suppose that bond investors cannot observe the issuer s assets directly and receive instead only periodic and imperfect accounting reports for a setting in which the assets of the firm are a geometric brownian motion until informed equityholders optimally liquidate we derive the conditional distribution of the assets given accounting data and survivorship contrary to the perfect information case there exists a default arrival intensity process that intensity is calculated in terms of the conditional distribution of assets credit yield spreads are characterized in terms of accounting information generalizations are provided

the paradox of liquidity the more liquid a firm s assets the greater their value in a short notice liquidation it is generally thought that a firm should find it easier to raise external finance against more liquid assets this paper focuses on the dark side of liquidity greater asset liquidity reduces the firm s ability to commit to a specific course of action as a result greater asset liquidity can in some circumstances reduce the firm s capacity to raise external finance firms with excessively liquid assets are in the best position to finance illiquid projects this leads us to a theory of financial intermediation and disintermediation based on the liquidity of assets

the changing geography of the military industry in britain lovering j 1991 the changing geography of the military industry in britain reg studies 25 279 293 a number of studies have suggested that defence spending has had a significant impact on the location of industry and the geography of labour markets this paper drawing on a recent study of the employment of research and development professionals in the uk defence industry confirms that defence spending and related employment has been concentrated in the south and west of england it also shows that a number of changes are underway the unusually large british defence industry is restructuring as a result of changes in supply and in demand following the end of the cold war major job losses are in process which may amount to a third of a million jobs in the 1990s this is associated with a spatial reorganization the effect of which is generally to consolidate high level activities in the industry in the south of england and deepen the spatial division of labour a key locational influence in this

equity bonds and bank debt capital structure and financial market equilibrium under asymmetric information this paper proposes a model of financial markets and corporate finance with asymmetric information and no taxes where equity issues bank debt and bond financing coexist in equilibrium the relationship banking aspect of financial intermediation is emphasized firms turn to banks as a source of investment mainly because banks are good at helping them through times of financial distress this financial flexibility is costly since banks face costs of capital themselves which they attempt to minimize through securitization to avoid this intermediation cost firms may turn to bond or equity financing but bonds imply an inefficient liquidation cost and equity an informational dilution cost we show that in equilib rium the riskier firms prefer bank loans the safer ones tap the bond markets and the ones in between prefer to issue both equity and bonds this segmentation is broadly consistent with stylized facts

investment incentives debt and warrants abstract this paper models and characterizes investment incentive problems associated with debt financing the decision problem of residual claimants is explicity formulated and their investment policies are characterized the paper also analyzes the use of conversion features and warrants to control distortionary incentives these claims reverse the convex shape of levered equity over the upper range of the firm s earnings and this mitigates the incentive to take risk it is shown that under certain conditions such claims can be constructed to restore net present value maximizing incentives and simultaneously meet the financing requirements of the firm

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices