Review of Finance Vol. 15 No. 2 2011
Shareholder-Manager Disagreement and Corporate Investment
Abstract
We develop a simple theoretical argument that generates testable predictions about how disagreement affects corporate investment and find strong empirical support for these predictions. Investment is negatively related to a proxy for disagreement, after controlling for Tobin’s q, and after dealing with the fact that Tobin’s q and our disagreement proxy contain measurement error. This proxy is unrelated to traditional indicators of asymmetric information. We also find that variation in disagreement is an important component of the portion of the variation in Tobin’s q that matters for investment, and that disagreement affects investment and Tobin’s q more if the firm has greater financial flexibility.
- DOI
- 10.1093/rof/rfq011
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 277-300
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref