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Corporate investment decisions require managers to forecast expected future cash flows from potential investments. Although these forecasts are a critical component of successful investing, they are not directly observable by external stakeholders. In this study, we investigate whether the quality of managers' externally reported earnings forecasts can be used to infer the quality of their corporate investment decisions. Relying on the intuition that managers draw on similar skills when generating external earnings forecasts and internal payoff forecasts for their investment decisions, we predict that managers with higher quality external earnings forecasts make better investment decisions. Consistent with our prediction, we find that forecasting quality is positively associated with the quality of both acquisition and capital expenditure decisions. Our evidence suggests that externally observed forecasting quality can be used to infer the quality of capital budgeting decisions within firms.

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at S&P 500 firms, we study their role in internal capital budgeting. Divisional managers with social connections to the CEO receive more capital. Connections to the CEO outweigh measures of managers' formal influence, such as seniority and board membership, and affect both managerial appointments and capital allocations. The effect of connections on investment efficiency depends on the tradeoff between agency and information asymmetry. Under weak governance, connections reduce investment efficiency and firm value via favoritism. Under high information asymmetry, connections increase investment efficiency and firm value via information transfer.

We evaluate the claim that individuals exhibit a magnitude effect in their discounting behaviour, where higher discount rates are inferred from choices made with lower principals, all else being equal. If the magnitude effect is quantitatively significant, it is not appropriate to use one discount rate that is independent of the scale of the project for cost–benefit analysis and capital budgeting. Using data from a field experiment in Denmark, we find statistically significant evidence of a magnitude effect that is much smaller than is claimed. This evidence surfaces only if one controls for unobserved individual heterogeneity in the population.

This paper studies the performance of delegated decision-making schemes in a two-stage, multidivision capital budgeting problem for a shared investment with an inherent abandonment option. Applying both robust goal congruence and sequential adverse selection frameworks, we show that the optimal capital budgeting mechanism entails a capital charge rate above the firm's cost of capital in the first stage but below the cost of capital in the second stage. Further, the first-stage asset cost-sharing rule depends only on the relative divisional growth profiles, and equal cost sharing can be optimal even when the divisions receive significantly different benefits from the shared investment project. In the presence of an adverse selection problem, all agency costs are incorporated into the second-stage budgeting mechanism, leaving the first-stage capital charge rate and asset-sharing rule unaffected even though the agency problem induces capital rationing at both stages. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting.

Capital budgeting frequently involves multiple stages at which firms can continue or abandon ongoing projects. In this paper, we study a project requiring two stages of investment. Failure to fund Stage 1 of the investment precludes investment in Stage 2, whereas failure to fund Stage 2 results in early termination. In contrast to the existing literature, we assume that the firm can limit the manager's informational rents with the early termination of the project. In this setting, we find that the firm optimally commits to a capital allocation scheme whereby it forgoes positive net present value (NPV) projects at Stage 1 (capital rationing), whereas at Stage 2, depending on the manager's previous report, it sometimes implements projects with a negative continuation NPV but in other situations forgoes implementing projects with positive continuation NPVs. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting.

This article compares capital budgeting techniques employed in listed and unlisted companies in Brazil. We surveyed the Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) of 398 listed companies and 300 large unlisted companies, and based on 91 respondents, the results suggest that the CFOs of listed companies tend to use less simplistic methods more often, for example: NPV and CAPM, and that CFOs of unlisted companies are less likely to estimate the cost of equity, despite being large companies. These findings indicate that stock exchange listing may require greater sophistication of the capital budgeting process. Reprinted by permission of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo ©PGV-EAESP/RAE www.fgvsp.br.rae

This study uses experimental methods to explore whether incorporating real options into net present value analysis can reduce escalation of commitment, or the tendency of decision makers to continue to commit resources to a project after receiving negative feedback. This reduction in escalation behavior should occur because the incorporation of real options offers the user greater cognitive accessibility to the possibility of project abandonment. Findings indicate that users of real options exhibit less escalation of commitment than do users of net present value analysis alone. The main result demonstrates that the use of real options in capital budgeting can affect the behavior and decisions of the user even in an experimental setting that controls for the informational advantage of using real options.

This study incorporates the strategic behavior of outsourcing with a variant Hotelling model to explore the role of input outsourcing in determining equilibrium locations for firms under quadratic transportation. Given that strategic input outsourcing occurs, we show that the cost-efficient integrated firm will locate as far away from its rival as possible, so as to increase its rival’s input price when its own cost advantage is small; at the same time, the cost-inefficient downstream firm likes to locate closer to its rival to lower the input price. Hence, there is an interior locational equilibrium, and the principle of maximum differentiation does not hold. When an integrated firm’s cost advantage is large, the principle of maximum differentiation is valid. However, when the integrated firm’s own cost advantage is even larger, the integrated firm can become a monopolist through strategic input outsourcing. Under this case, the equilibrium location depends on the magnitude of the input homemade ratio when the input homemade ratio is small. Otherwise, the integrated firm would like to locate at the middle of the market.