We investigate the impact of cash reserves upon the optimal behaviour of a modelled firm that has uncertain future revenues. To achieve this, we build up a corporate financing model of a firm from a Real Options foundation, with the option to close as a core business decision maintained throughout. We model the firm by employing an optimal stochastic control mathematical approach, which is based upon a partial differential equations perspective. In so doing, we are able to assess the incremental impacts upon the optimal operation of the cash constrained firm, by sequentially including: an optimal dividend distribution; optimal equity financing; and optimal debt financing (conducted in a novel equilibrium setting between firm and creditor). We present efficient numerical schemes to solve these models, which are generally built from the Projected Successive Over Relaxation (PSOR) method, and the Semi-Lagrangian approach. Using these numerical tools, and our gained economic insights, we then allow the firm the option to also expand the operation, so they may also take advantage of favourable economic conditions.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:15:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 61080100005.pdf: 995968 bytes, checksum: 5965a1eae5614cf30474fda5b8ad7a13 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-02-26T00:00:00Z / Pesquisas que integram as teorias de estratégia e opções reais sugerem que firmas podem ser vistas sob a perspectiva de um portfólio de oportunidades a serem capturadas no futuro, de forma que recursos, capacitações e processos organizacionais devem ser combinados visando a sua otimização. Firmas diferem entre si quanto a esta capacidade de otimização e esta heterogeneidade, adicionada aos efeitos de outros fatores, estão refletidos na variabilidade e no comportamento dinâmico do valor das opções de crescimento (vgo), tema central desta dissertação. A análise de decomposição de variâncias confirma um efeito firma preponderante, consistente com resultados obtidos em pesquisas prévias, e os resultados gerados pelos modelos de curvas latentes sob o enfoque de equações estruturais levam à conclusão de que tamanho importa, tem impacto estatisticamente significante sobre o intercepto e explica as diferenças cross section entre firmas do valor dos vgo’s observados no início do período de análise, enquanto que os efeitos do dinamismo da indústria são positivos e significantes e variam com o tempo de forma não linear. Entretanto, remanescem parcelas relevantes de variâncias não explicadas nos três parâmetros latentes que determinam as trajetórias de vgo ao longo do tempo, provavelmente devido aos impactos de fatores não observáveis e idiossincráticos às organizações. / Research that integrate strategy and real options theories suggest that firms can be regarded as a portfolio of future opportunities and that resources, capabilities and organizational processes must be in place in order to ensure its optimization. Firms differ in this optimization capacity and this heterogeneity along with the effects of other factors are reflected in the variability and in the dynamic behavior of the value of growth options (vgo). In accordance with previous studies using variance component methodology, firm effects are predominant over country and industry effects and explain a significant portion of total variance of vgo. Longitudinal analyses through latent curve models under the perspective of structural equations (complemented by hierarchical linear models) confirm that size explain the cross-section differences in the initial values of vgo, whereas industry dynamism has a positive and significant effect on vgo that varies non-linearly across time. Apart from the effects of these covariates, there still remains a significant portion of unexplained variances in latent parameters that determine the trajectories of vgo across time, probably due to the effect of unobservable and firm-specific factors.