Entrepreneurs often face undiversifiable idiosyncratic risks from their business investments. We extend the standard real options approach to an incomplete markets environment and analyze the joint decisions of business investments, consumption/savings, and portfolio selection. For a lump-sum investment payoff and an agent with a sufficiently strong precautionary savings motive, an increase in volatility can accelerate investment, contrary to the standard real options analysis. When the agent can trade the market portfolio to partially hedge against investment risk, the systematic volatility is compensated via the standard CAPM argument, and the idiosyncratic volatility generates a private equity premium. Finally, when the investment payoff is a series of flows, the agent's idiosyncratic risk exposure alters both the implied option value and the implied project value, causing a reversal of the results in the lump-sum payoff case.

This paper provides a model of investment timing by managers in a decentralized firm in the presence of agency conflicts and information asymmetries. When investment decisions are delegated to managers, contracts must be designed to provide incentives for managers to both extend effort and truthfully reveal private information. Using a real options approach, we show that an underlying option to invest can be decomposed into two components: a manager's option and an owner's option. The implied investment behavior differs significantly from that of the first-best no-agency solution. In particular, greater inertia occurs in investment, as the model predicts that the manager will have a more valuable option to wait than the owner.

Hedge fund managers trade off the benefits of leveraging on the alpha-generating strategy against the costs of inefficient fund liquidation. In contrast to the standard risk-seeking intuition, even with a constant-return-to-scale alpha-generating strategy, a risk-neutral manager becomes endogenously risk-averse and decreases leverage following poor performance to increase the fund's survival likelihood. Our calibration suggests that management fees are the majority of the total compensation. Money flows, managerial restart options, and management ownership increase the importance of high-water-mark-based incentive fees but management fees remain the majority. Investors' valuation of fees are highly sensitive to their assessments of the manager's skill.

The 2008 financial crisis exemplifies significant uncertainties in corporate financing conditions. We develop a unified dynamic q-theoretic framework where firms have both a precautionary-savings motive and a market-timing motive for external financing and payout decisions, induced by stochastic financing conditions. The model predicts (1) cuts in investment and payouts in bad times and equity issues in good times even without immediate financing needs; (2) a positive correlation between equity issuance and stock repurchase waves. We show quantitatively that real effects of financing shocks may be substantially smoothed out as a result of firms' adjustments in anticipation of future financial crises.

We develop an incomplete-markets q-theoretic model to study entrepreneurship dynamics. Precautionary motive, borrowing constraints, and capital illiquidity lead to underinvestment, conservative debt use, under-consumption, and less risky portfolio allocation. The endogenous liquid wealth-illiquid capital ratio w measures time-varying financial constraint. The option to accumulate wealth before entry is critical for entrepreneurship. Flexible exit option is important for risk management purposes. Investment increases and the private marginal value of liquidity decreases as w decreases and exit becomes more likely, contrary to predictions of standard financial constraint models. We show that the idiosyncratic risk premium is quantitatively significant, especially for low w.

We develop a dynamic model of a platform economy where tokens serve as a means of payment among platform users and are issued to finance investment in platform productivity. Tokens are optimally rewarded to platform owners when token supply (normalized by productivity) is low and burnt to boost franchise value when the normalized supply is high. Although token price is determined in a liquid market, the platform’s financial constraint generates an endogenous token issuance cost that causes underinvestment through the conflict of interest between insiders (owners) and outsiders (users). Blockchain technology mitigates underinvestment by addressing the owners’ time inconsistency problem.

We study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value by incorporating a widely used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk information to predict investments when empirical measurement issues of Tobin’s average q are significant (e.g., equity is much more likely to be mis-priced than debt), as in Philippon (2009). We find, consistent with our theory, that credit spreads and bond q have significant predictive powers on micro-level and aggregate investments corroborating the recent empirical work of Gilchrist and Zakrajšek (2012). We also show that the quantitative effects of the stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment, Tobin’s average q, the duration and user cost of capital, and the value of growth opportunities are substantial. These findings are particularly important in today’s low interest rate environment.