Title
Financing Capacity with Stealing and Shirking
Abstract
We study a firm's capacity choice under demand uncertainty given that it must finance this investment externally. Sharing profits with investors causes governance problems affecting both capacity and demand: the firm may "steal" capital, which reduces effective capacity, and "shirk" on market development, which reduces demand. We adopt an optimal contracting approach whereby the firm optimizes among feasible financial claims derived endogenously. We characterize its optimal financing and capacity choices. First, debt financing is optimal: it minimizes the incentives to both divert and shirk. Second, the firm underinvests (overinvests) if the effort problem is mild (severe) enough relative to the diversion problem. Thus, a worsening of the same governance problem can lead to over-or underinvestment depending on circumstances. Third, we find that the diversion and shirking problems interact in their impact on capacity investment. in particular, if the shirking problem is mild enough, the more severe the diversion problem, the less the firm invests. However, if the shirking problem is severe enough, the effect of diversion is reversed: the more severe the diversion problem, the more the firm invests.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1287/mnsc.2018.3186
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
Keywords
Field
DocType
capacity investment,optimal contracts,capital diversion,financial constraints,newsvendor model,moral hazard
Newsvendor model,Corporate governance,Economics,Microeconomics,Moral hazard,Finance,Profit (economics)
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
65
11
0025-1909
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Francis de Véricourt101.01
Denis Gromb281.97