Finance Professor Laura Lindsey and her co-authors say that they are the first — to the best of their knowledge — to formalize an empirical model for testing economic theories concerning the formation of ties between firms. The findings can potentially help entrepreneurs identify which attributes to consider when evaluating a VC firm.
A year ago the recovering Phoenix real estate market suddenly shifted to weak, and the market has remained down ever since. We asked Mike Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W. P. Carey School of Business, what one word he would use to describe the market this fall. The word he chose was “subdued.”
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008, corporate officers around the world have been building up their balance sheets with mountains of cash and marketable securities — a lot of it in other countries. At the kickoff of the 30th anniversary season of the Economic Club of Phoenix, Professor Thomas Bates, chairman of the Department of Finance at the W. P. Carey School of Business, delivered a primer on cash holdings.
Jim Davidson, co-founder, managing partner and managing director of Silver Lake, is the 2014 Executive of the Year.
New research by assistant finance professor Claudia Custodio has found that the diversification discount can be grossly over-estimated as a result of flaws in the way it has traditionally been calculated. Such exaggeration of the discount could shade a proposed acquisition in an overly-negative light and provide an inaccurate picture of a conglomerate’s potential value. “It can give a biased view and is not a reliable measure in certain situations,” Custodio said of her findings.
Real estate professor Andra Ghent’s study of historical mortgage laws and foreclosure statistics shows that state laws vary greatly and, when laws require lenders to work through the court system, foreclosure processes tend to drag on and on. Such delays can hobble housing-market recovery. In fact, it’s happening now and, according to Ghent, now would be a good time for market troubles to kick-start legal reform of mortgage law across the United States.
