A simulation approach to the valuation of capital budgeting projects incorporating a defer option

Resumen

Techniques applied to determine the value of derivatives have been recently exported in the field of investment valuation. This paper aims to provide some light to the use of a new technique in the investment valuation literature, aiming to take into account the value of flexibility. This technique, designed by Longstaff and Schwartz, combines Monte Carlo simulation and the Ordinary Least Squares in order to value American-style derivatives with different specifications. We show that this method can easily be incorporated to value capital budgeting projects in the framework of the real options theory and provides coherent results from an economic point of view. We do this by estimating the value of several cases of an investment project that incorporates an option to defer the initial investment or layout through time. We estimate these values by using the Ox programming language.