← Search

American Economic Review Vol. 100 No. 2 2010

Growth Opportunities and Technology Shocks

Leonid Kogan1; Dimitris Papanikolaou2

1 MIT Sloan School of Management, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02139. · 2 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

open access

Abstract

We propose a theoretically motivated procedure for measuring heterogeneity in firms’ growth opportunities and document its empirical properties. The term “growth opportunities” refers to the component of a firm’s market value that cannot be attributed to its assets in place. This decomposition of firm value underpins many of the theoretical models describing cross-sectional differences in firms’ investment and stock return behavior. However, successful applications of such models depend on the quality of empirical measures of growth opportunities. Our procedure identifies economically significant differences in firms’ growth opportunities which are not captured by the commonly used empirical measures.

DOI
10.1257/aer.100.2.532
Volume
100
Issue
2
Pages
532-536
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite