机构信息公司投资agency, information and corporate investment.pdfVIP

Agency, Information and Corporate Investment Jeremy C. Stein Harvard University and NBER June 2001 Abstract: This essay surveys the body of research that asks how the efficiency of corporate investment is influenced by problems of asymmetric information and agency. I organize the material around two basic questions. First, does the external capital market channel the right amount of money to each firm? That is, does the market get across-firm allocations right, so that the marginal return to investment in firm i is the same as the marginal return to investment in firmj ? Second, do internal capital markets channel the right amount of money to individual projects within firms? That is, does the internal capital budgeting process get within- firm allocations right, so that the marginal return to investment in firm i’s division A is the same as the marginal return to investment in firm i ’s division B? In addition to discussing the theoretical and empirical work that bears most directly on these questions, the essay also briefly sketches some of the implications of this work for broader issues in both macroeconomics and the theory of the firm. This paper is to appear as a chapter in the Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edited by George Constantinides, Milt Harris and René Stulz. I am grateful to the NSF for financial support, and to Geoff Tate and Ann Richards for research assistance. Thanks also to Judy Chevalier, Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmstrom, Steve Kaplan, Owen Lamont, Raghu Rajan, David Scharfstein, Andrei Shleifer and René Stulz for their input. I. Introduction A fundamental question in corporate finance is this: to what extent does capital get allocated to the right investment projects? In a perfect world, with frictionless capital markets of