Essays on Competition, Corporate Financing and Investment: A stochastic Dynamic Approach.

Abstract

This thesis contains four studies on economic and finance theory that analyze the effects of time, uncertainty and information on firms’ strategic and financial decisions. The first essay presents a game-theoretic model of dynamic signaling taking place in an evolving environment. The model is applied to study dynamic limit-pricing strategies under stochastic demand. The second essay analyzes the effects of short-term liquidity shocks and long-term solvency distress on corporate finance policies. The last two papers study corporate investment decisions under uncertainty. In one essay, investment project lifetime is shown to critically affect investment behavior. The last paper studies optimal divestment policies and the trade-off between the flexibility of partial divestment and the premium of full-firm sale.