Tender Offers, Proxy Contests, and Large-Shareholder Activism

The paper analyzes tender offers and proxy contests as alternative means of resolving corporate governance conflicts between dissidents and incumbent management. We show that when a dissident shareholder is sufficiently confident about the potential benefits from changing corporate policy, he will seek majority control by making a tender offer rather than initiating a proxy contest. When the dissident is relatively uninformed, however, he may opt for a proxy contest, thereby utilizing the information of other shareholders to implement the better policy. Consistent with empirical evidence, the model predicts that announcements of tender offers will tend to be associated with larger positive stockprice reactions than announcements of proxy contests. The model is easily extended to allow for promanagement bias in proxy voting by institutional investors. Empirical observations that have been viewed as evidence of such promanagement bias are shown to be quite consistent with the absence of such bias. Policy issues are discussed as well. An interesting result is that even policies targeted at reducing the costs of conducting proxy contests may have ambiguous social consequences, given the possibility of substitution between tender offers and proxy contests.     

Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions:(1) How should accounting prices be estimated?(2) How should we evaluate policy change in animperfect economy? (3) How can we check whetherintergenerational well-being will be sustainedalong a projected economic programme? We do notpresume that the economy is convex, nor do weassume that the government optimizes on behalfof its citizens. We show that the same set ofaccounting prices should be used both forpolicy evaluation and for assessing whether ornot intergenerational welfare along a giveneconomic path will be sustained. We also showthat a comprehensive measure of wealth,computed in terms of the accounting prices, canbe used as an index for problems (2) and (3)above. The remainder of the paper is concernedwith rules for estimating the accounting pricesof several specific environmental naturalresources, transacted in a few well knowneconomic institutions.     

Coordinated voting in sequential and simultaneous elections: some experimental evidence

This paper studies a situation wherein a set of voters choose between two alternatives in the presence of a payoff externality. Specifically, regardless of her intrinsic preference, a voter’s payoff is maximized should she vote for the alternative that garners a majority of the votes cast. Are votes coordinated on a single alternative? Using laboratory experiments, we examine voting patterns in sequential voting and simultaneous voting elections. Across both election types, we also vary the amount of information that an individual voter has regarding the intrinsic preferences of the other voters. Our main findings are as follows. In the “low” information treatment, sequential voting elections facilitate coordinated voting. However, in the “high” information treatment, voting patterns are not dependent on how the election is structured.     

On the concept of optimum population

The economic welfare of a community is affected by policies that determine both the rate of capital accumulation and the rate of growth of population. The optimum size of population at any point is time will depend on the size of the existing capital stock and the optimum rate of savings will depend on the existing number of people. Consequently, in this sense, a population policy cannot be developed without a concurrent savings policy. The criterion of optimality that will be used is the ma ximization of the total discounted welfare of all generations from now to infinity. The problem will be to select that rate of savings and that size of population at every moment which will achieve this maximum welfare if, in fact, a maximum exists. An inquiry is made into the existence of an optimum policy under various circumstances. An attempt is made to evaluate the consequences of various ethical beliefs.     

Intertemporal Equity and Hartwick's Rule in an Exhaustible Resource Model*

In a standard exhaustible resource model, it is known that if, along a competitive path, investment in the augmentable capital good equals the rents on the exhaustible resource (known as Hartwick's rule), then the path is equitable in the sense that the consumption level is constant over time. In this paper, we show the converse of this result: if a competitive path is equitable, then it must satisfy Hartwick's rule.     

SEARCH BEHAVIOR OF ASYMMETRICALLY INFORMED VOTERS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY*

This paper experimentally investigates individual level search within a spatial election model. In our model the voter is required to cast a ballot for one of two candidates. However, the voter's task is made non-trivial since, even though the location of one candidate is known, the location of a second candidate is unknown. To reduce uncertainty regarding the unknown candidate's location, the voter may undertake an information search. We find that search in this environment is a function of the cost of search, the quality of information, and the voter's location on the issue space.     

Beyond internal capital markets: The in-house transmission of adverse sales shocks and the collateral channel

We study how shocks to some business segments affect investment in a firm's non-shock segments. We find that subsequent investment in the non-shock segments is significantly lower compared to segments of firms that do not experience shocks. Surprisingly, lower availability of internal funds does not account for the lower investment. We find that segment shocks propagate within the firm by decreasing the value of collateral assets and reducing the availability of external finance. Our results support the operation of an external finance collateral channel ([Kiyotaki, N., Moore, J., 1997. Credit cycles. Journal of Political Economy 105, 211–248.]) previously discussed in the literature.     

Bargaining and brinkmanship : Capital structure choice by regulated firms

A bargaining model of regulation is developed. It is shown that regulated firms can improve their bargaining positions and induce the regulator to set higher prices for firm output by choosing more debt. Firms, in choosing an optimal level of debt, trade off this bargaining advantage against expected bankruptcy costs. The model predicts that firms would tend to choose higher levels of debt in harsher regulatory environments. This prediction is shown to be consistent with cross-sectional evidence for U.S. electric utilities for the sample period 1972–1983.     

Dynamic coordination with individual learning

We study coordination in dynamic global games with private learning. Players choose whether and when to invest irreversibly in a project whose success depends on its quality and the timing of investment. Players gradually learn about project quality. We identify conditions on temporal incentives under which, in sufficiently long games, players coordinate on investing whenever doing so is not dominated. Roughly speaking, this outcome occurs whenever players? payoffs are sufficiently tolerant of non-simultaneous coordination. We also identify conditions under which players coordinate on the risk-dominant action. We provide foundations for these results in terms of higher order beliefs.