A standard real options model predicts a strong positive interaction effect between research and development (R&D) investment and product market competition. R&D-intensive firms tend to be riskier and earn higher expected returns than R&D-weak firms, particularly in competitive industries. Also, firms in competitive industries earn higher expected returns than firms in concentrated industries, especially among R&D-intensive firms. Intuitively, R&D projects are more likely to fail in the presence of more competition because rival firms could win the innovation race. Empirical evidence largely supports the model׳s predictions.

Investment-based asset pricing research highlights the role of irreversibility as a determinant of firms’ risk and expected return. In a neoclassical model of a firm with costly scale adjustment options, we show that the effect of scale flexibility (i. e., contraction and expansion options) is to determine the relation between risk and operating leverage: risk increases with operating leverage for inflexible firms, but decreases for flexible firms. Guided by theory, we construct easily reproducible proxies for inflexibility and operating leverage. Empirical tests provide support for the predicted interaction of these characteristics in stock returns and risk.

This article examines how accounting transparency and corporate governance interact. Firms with better governance are associated with higher abnormal returns, but even more so if they also have higher transparency. The effect is largely monotonic—it is small and insignificant for opaque firms and large and significant for transparent firms—and survives numerous robustness tests. We find supportive evidence for firm value and operating performance. Hence, governance and transparency are complements. This complementarity effect is consistent with the view that more transparent firms are more likely takeover targets, because acquirers can bid more effectively and identify synergies more precisely.

ABSTRACT Firms' inflexibility in adjusting output prices to economic shocks exacerbates information asymmetry with respect to firms' profits, but public information on firms' cost structure mitigates this problem. We construct a novel form of public information from economic statistics disclosed by the government and find that such public information significantly reduces inflexible‐price firms' bid–ask spreads, the probability of informed trading, and analyst forecast dispersions, but these results do not hold for flexible‐price firms. Security analysts seek more cost‐related information during conference calls about inflexible‐price firms, but such a phenomenon is observed less frequently if a firm's input cost is more publicly observable. In addition, stock markets react more strongly to earning news announced by inflexible‐price firms, consistent with our intuition.

Investment-based asset pricing research highlights the role of irreversibility as a determinant of firms' risk and expected return. In a neoclassical model of a firm with costly scale adjustment options, we show that the effect of scale flexibility (i.e., contraction and expansion options) is to determine the relation between risk and operating leverage: risk increases with operating leverage for inflexible firms, but decreases for flexible firms. Guided by theory, we construct easily reproducible proxies for inflexibility and operating leverage. Empirical tests provide support for the predicted interaction of these characteristics in stock returns and risk.

We examine the effect of labor mobility on venture capital (VC) investment. Following the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine that restricts labor mobility, VCs are less likely to invest in affected states. This effect is more pronounced when human capital is more important to startups, when VC investment is more uncertain, and when VCs’ monitoring costs are higher. The reduced innovation productivity of employees is a plausible underlying mechanism. To mitigate this adverse effect, VCs stage finance startups more and syndicate more with other VCs. Our paper sheds new light on the real effects of labor market frictions.