Submitted by K. Ndrepepaj on Fri, 26/06/2015 - 14:06
The conference took place in Athens, 17-20 June:
The title of Bart Lambrecht’s keynote address was: ”Real Options and Agency Dynamics in Corporate”. The talk brought together a number of papers that Bart has written with Stewart Myers from MIT. Their research presents a unified agency framework for analysing a range of important decisions that affect public corporations, such as the investment, financing and payout decisions, as well as takeovers and corporate restructurings. In this framework the management of a public corporation makes the key decisions, but subject to a threat of intervention by outside shareholders. Investor protection and the threat of intervention forces managers to provide outside investors with an adequate return on their investment. Intervention is, however, costly and this gives insiders space to extract some rents from the company or to implement decisions that are not optimal for shareholders. On the basis of these simple premises the authors derive important implications about the dynamics of corporate payout, capital structure, and investment. They also explain why often external discipliners (raiders, hostile acquirers) rather than outside shareholders intervene and restructure firms.