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Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 109 No. 4 1994

Internal versus External Capital Markets

R. H. Gertner1,2; D. S. Scharfstein1,2; Johannes Stein1,2

1 National Bureau of Economic Research · 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of internal versus external capital allocation. We focus primarily on comparing an internal capital market with bank lending. While both represent centralized forms of financing, in the former case the financing is owner-provided, while in the latter case it is not. We argue that the ownership aspect of internal capital allocation has three important consequences: (1) it leads to more monitoring than bank lending; (2) it reduces managers' entrepreneurial incentives; and (3) it makes it easier to efficiently redeploy the assets of projects that are performing poorly under existing management.

DOI
10.2307/2118361
Volume
109
Issue
4
Pages
1211-1230
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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