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This paper looks at the research to date on the future of broadly granted stock options (options granted to at least half the full-time employees of a company). In the U.S., granting options broadly became popular in the late 1990s, but has lost some of its appeal in the wake of stock market declines, accounting changes, and increased shareholder concerns about dilution. The data indicate a significant minority of companies will change their plans, but a substantial majority will keep them. The data also indicate changes in accounting rules will not affect stock prices and that broadly granted options are better for corporate performance than narrowly granted options.

The flexibility of managers to respond to risk and uncertainty inherent in business decisions is clearly of value. This value has historically been recognized in an ad hoc manner in the absence of a methodology for more rigorous assessment of value. The application of real option methodology represents a more objective mechanism that allows managers to hedge against adverse effects and exploit upside potential. Of particular interest to managers in the merger and acquisition (M&A) process is the value of such flexibility related to the particular terms of a transaction. Typically, stock for stock transactions take more time to complete as compared to cash given the time lapse between announcement and completion. Over this period, if stock prices are volatile, stock for stock exchanges may result in adverse selection through the dilution of shareholder wealth of an acquiring firm or a target firm.

The paper develops a real option collar model that may be employed by managers to measure the market price risk involved to their shareholders in offering or accepting stock. We further discuss accounting issues related to this contingency pricing effect. Using an acquisition example from U.S. banking industry we illustrate how the collar arrangement may be used to hedge market price risk through flexibility to renegotiate the deal by exercising managerial options.

I construct a set of dynamic macroeconomic models to analyze the effect of unskilled immigration on wage inequality. The immigrants or their descendants do not remain unskilled – over time they may approach or exceed the general level of educational attainment. In the baseline model, the economy's capital supply is determined endogenously by the savings behavior of infinite-lived dynasties, and I also consider models in which the supply of capital is perfectly elastic, or exogenously determined. I derive a simple formula that determines the time discounted value of the skill premium enjoyed by college-educated workers following a change in the rate of immigration for unskilled workers, or a change in the degree or rate at which unskilled immigrants become skilled. I compare the calculations of the skill premiums to data from the US Current Population Survey to determine the long-run effect of different immigrant groups on wage inequality in the United States.

A long-time ethical issue in financial accounting is earnings management. Two popular ways that earnings are managed include use of accruals (Kothari et al., 2016) and real activities management (RM). This study examines the association between RM and short selling and an association between short sellers and RM behavior related to earnings management. Instead of using accruals, RM is accomplished by timing investment or financing decisions and thereby alter reported earnings. Our results show that short sellers avoid targeting firms with a high level of RM, but this only holds for those firms that just meet analysts’ forecasts. This result suggests that short sellers interpret RM as a signal used by companies to convey their “good news” and confidence in their future performance. On the other hand, the authors document that heavily shorted firms engage in a lower amount of RM, which is consistent with the notion that short selling plays an external disciplinary role in constraining firms’ RM behavior for earnings management. This chapter would be of interest to anyone concerned with earnings management, such as financial market analysts, investors, academic researchers, and, in particular, regulators, who are involved in setting rules on short selling.

The chapter provides a practical guide to identify and define different funding sources for entrepreneurial and innovation endeavors, including a methodology to describe return on investment expectations from funding sources. Also, the authors provide recommended key performance indicators and valuation methods when pitching to potential investors.

This chapter will describe and analyze the evolution of the structure, content, and other key parameters of business plans in international business plan competitions from the beginnings of such competitions in 1991 through the current time. In particular, the chapter will describe how these competitions have evolved through the current time, the standardization of the structure and content of the plans submitted to these competitions, and the changes that have occurred in their structure and content over time. Then it will explain why these changes have occurred. Specifically, that most of the changes that have occurred in these various areas is a direct or indirect result of pressures on the competitions from the major judges used in them – namely U.S. venture capitalists. Appendices A and B will describe the evaluation criteria used in two of the major competitions – Moot Corp/Venture Labs^® and the Georgia Bowl^® – in more detail, while Appendices C and D will provide information on the Term Sheets and decision-making processes used by such venture capitalists. Appendix E contains four Exhibits that provide additional insights into U.S. venture capitalists’ thought processes. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the additional changes that are likely to happen in the future.