Corporate Investment and Financing Under Asymmetric Information

61 Pages Posted: 8 Jan 2009 Last revised: 2 Apr 2010

See all articles by Erwan Morellec

Erwan Morellec

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; Swiss Finance Institute

Norman Schuerhoff

Swiss Finance Institute - HEC Lausanne

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: March 10, 2010

Abstract

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in which corporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show that firms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors using the timing of corporate actions and their debt-equity mix. Using this result, we show that asymmetric information induces firms with good prospects to speed up investment, leading to a significant erosion of the option value of waiting to invest. Additionally, we demonstrate that informational asymmetries may not translate into a financing hierarchy or pecking order over securities. Finally, we generate a rich set of testable implications relating firms' investment and financing strategies, abnormal announcement returns, and external financing costs to a number of managerial, firm, and industry characteristics

Keywords: real options, investment timing, asymmetric information, financing

Suggested Citation

Morellec, Erwan and Schuerhoff, Norman, Corporate Investment and Financing Under Asymmetric Information (March 10, 2010). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1012049 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1012049

Erwan Morellec (Contact Author)

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne ( email )

College of Management
Extranef Quartier UNIL-Dorigny
1015 Lausanne, CH-1015
Switzerland

HOME PAGE: http://sfi.epfl.ch/

Swiss Finance Institute

c/o University of Geneva
40, Bd du Pont-d'Arve
CH-1211 Geneva 4
Switzerland

Norman Schuerhoff

Swiss Finance Institute - HEC Lausanne ( email )

Chavannes-près-Renens
Switzerland

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