This study examines the financing of innovation in the presence of adverse selection in the capital market. An entrepreneur with private information needs outside funding for a project requiring costly experimentation. Equilibrium contracts use the duration of the experimentation period, together with pay-for-performance, to signal information to outside investors. As a result, investment is delayed, entrepreneurs with stronger growth options receive vested stock options, and entrepreneurs with a lower probability of success are compensated in case of failure. These predictions are in line with empirical evidence on venture capital contracts, and on the impact of internal financing on risk taking. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This paper studies an economy in which demand spillovers make firms’ production decisions strategic complements. Firms choose their operating leverage trading off higher fixed costs for lower variable costs. Operating leverage governs firms’ exposures to an aggregate labor productivity shock. In equilibrium, firms exhibit excessive operating leverage because they do not internalize that an economy with higher aggregate operating leverage is more likely to fall into a recession following a negative productivity shock. Welfare losses coming from firms’ failure to coordinate production are amplified by suboptimal risk-taking, which magnifies the impact of productivity shocks onto aggregate output.

Abstract We model risk management as information acquisition that delays trading decisions. In markets with preemptive competition, this can lead to a race to the bottom, where prioritizing trade execution over risk management is optimal for each firm, but collectively inefficient. As time competition intensifies, mean trading profit supplants risk concerns as the main driver of risk management quality, causing risk misallocation to rise with trading speed and volume. This pathology of risk management failure—the trio of time-consuming risk assessment, preemptive competition, and boom markets—has distinctive regulatory implications. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.