Corporate Policies In A World With Information Asymmetry

To raise the necessary capital to finance the initial investment for the firm, a manager must enter into a transaction with outside investors to raise the additional funds. In this situation, the manager of a public corporation faces three key capital acquisition decisions:

The investment decision: Should the manager transact with outside investors and raise the necessary capital to invest in the project? The financing decision: If the manager decides to raise external capital, how should the investment be financed with debt, with equity, or with some other security? The dividend decision: How much of the firm's available cash should the manager pay out in dividends?

Modern corporate finance theory, originating with the seminal work of Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani, has demonstrated that these decisions depend on the information that the manager and investors have about the firm's future cash flows.

In this book, the authors examine these decisions by assuming that the manager has private information about the firm's future cash flows and provides a unified framework that explains many empirical anomalies in the literature, one that provides guidance for better empirical tests.