管理自主权与最优融资政策.docVIP

原文： Managerial Discretion and Optimal Financing Policies Introduction In this paper, I investigate how financing policies can be used to restrict management’s ability to pursue its own objectives when it has information that shareholders do not have. I show that optimal financing policies reduce the costs shareholders bear if management tends to invest too much and that these policies depend on the distribution of cash flow in each period as well as on their present value. Consider a firm with atomistic shareholders who observe neither the firm’s cash flow nor management’s investment decisions. I assume it is costly for shareholders to act collectively once cash flow has accrued, so they cannot force management to pay out cash. The managers value investment because their perquisites increase with investment even when the firm invests in negative net present value (NPV) projects. Consequently, when cash flow is high, they invest in negative NPV projects rather than pay out cash. The informational asymmetry between managers and shareholders leads to inefficient investment when cash flow is low because management cannot credibly convince shareholders that cash flow is insufficient to take advantage of all positive NPV opportunities. Management always tells shareholders that the firm cannot take advantage of all its positive NPV opportunities. Consequently, shareholders never believe management’s assertion that cash flow is too low, because management always benefits from increasing investment. Debt payments force managers to pay out cash flow and hence reduce investment in all states of the world. Consequently, debt payments affect shareholder wealth both positively, by reducing investment when it would otherwise be too high, and negatively, by inhibiting advantageous investment in other states of the world. The tradeoff between the cost and the benefit of debt implies that there is a debt payment that maximizes firm value. The optimal debt payment is negative when s