In Too Deep: The Effect of Sunk Costs on Corporate Investment
研究发现企业系统性地未能忽略沉没成本，导致投资决策扭曲；在固定换股并购中，市场波动带来的成本变化显著影响企业对收购业务的后续投入，成本增加使剥离率降低8%至9%。
ABSTRACT Sunk costs are unrecoverable costs that should not affect decision making. I provide evidence that firms systematically fail to ignore sunk costs and that this leads to significant investment distortions. In fixed‐exchange‐ratio stock mergers, aggregate market fluctuations after parties enter into a binding merger agreement induce plausibly exogenous variation in the final acquisition cost. These quasi‐random cost shocks strongly predict firms' commitment to an acquired business following deal completion, with an interquartile cost increase reducing subsequent divestiture rates by 8% to 9%. Consistent with an intrapersonal sunk cost channel, distortions are concentrated in firm‐years in which the acquiring CEO is still in office.