Discussion.

The article presents commentary from Paola Sapienza about a paper written by Naveen Khanna and Sheri Tice (K&T) entitled "The Bright Side of Internal Capital Markets," which appeared in the August, 2001 issue of the "Journal of Finance." In that paper K&T discussed the impact on both diversified and stand-alone firms of Wal-Mart's entry into their markets. The author of the current paper notes that K&T assumed Wal-Mart's entry to be an exogenous and unanticipated event, and raises questions over whether that is indeed the case.