Are Companies "Risk-Neutral"?

I've always wondered why it's so readily common in finance to assume that a company is "risk-neutral."  The common idea is that people are risk-averse, but organizations are risk-neutral.

And yet, that's always bothered me, because a company doesn't make decisions - rather, the people that comprise the company and the corporate culture make operational and strategic corporate decisions.  And if people tend to be risk-averse -- doesn't that attitude toward risk carryover into their working lives and activities?

Here's a paper posted on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN, at www.ssrn.com) titled "Behavioral Consistency in Corporate Finance: CEO Personal and Corporate Leverage," which seems to point in the direction of my concern.  Here's the abstract:

"We find that firms behave consistently with how their CEOs behave personally in the context of leverage choices. Analyzing data on CEOs' leverage in their most recent primary home purchases, we find a positive, economically relevant, robust relation between corporate and personal leverage in the cross-section and when examining CEO turnovers. The results are consistent with an endogenous matching of CEOs to firms based on preferences, as well as with CEOs imprinting their personal preferences on the firms they manage, particularly when governance is weaker. Besides enhancing our understanding of the determinants of corporate capital structures, the broader contribution of the paper is to show that CEOs' personal behavior can, in part, explain corporate financial behavior of the firms they manage."

- Rick

Recent increases in Fertility Rates

An abstract from an article in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Population Economics finds

"... fertility increases among college graduate women, especially at older ages since the mid- to late 1990s. There are also increases in fertility among less-educated women, but these are concentrated at younger ages."

- Rick

Intergenerational Debt

A nice piece from Niall Ferguson in The Telegraph, "We're Mortgaging the Future of the Younger Generation."  Some quotes:

"Often these debts get discussed as if they themselves were the problem, and the result is a rather sterile argument between proponents of “austerity” and “stimulus”. I want to suggest that they are a consequence of a more profound malaise." 

"The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn. In this regard, the statistics commonly cited as government debt are themselves deeply misleading, for they encompass only the sums owed by governments in the form of bonds." 

"... the official debts in the form of bonds do not include the often far larger unfunded liabilities of welfare schemes like – to give the biggest American programmes – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security."

- Rick

Modeling Culture

Anyone interested in modeling European business climate and prodictivity might take note of this article from yesterday's New York Times website:

" For most Europeans, almost nothing is more prized than their four to six weeks of guaranteed annual vacation leave. But it was not clear just how sacrosanct that time off was until Thursday, when Europe’s highest court ruled that workers who happened to get sick on vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation. "

- Rick