This review evaluates the four major theories of corporate financing: (1) the Modigliani-Miller theory of capital-structure irrelevance, in which firm values and real investment decisions are unaffected by financing; (2) the trade-off theory, in which firms balance the tax advantages of...

This essay surveys the body of research that asks how the efficiency of corporate investment is influenced by problems of asymmetric information and agency. I organize the material around two basic questions. First, does the external capital market channel the right amount of money to each firm?...

This paper surveys the literature on payout policy. We start out by discussing several stylized facts that are important to the development of any comprehensive payout policy framework. We then describe the Miller and Modigliani (1961) payout irrelevance proposition, and consider the effect of...

Corporate governance is concerned with the resolution of collective action problems among dispersed investors and the reconciliation of conflicts of interest between various corporate claimholders. In this survey we review the theoretical and empirical research on the main mechanisms of...

This chapter analyzes the securities issuance process, focusing on initial public offerings (IPOs) and seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). The IPO literature documents three empirical patterns: 1) short-run underpricing; 2) long-run underperformance (although this is contentious); and 3) extreme...

Market microstructure deals with the purest form of financial intermediation -- the trading of a financial asset, such as a stock or a bond. In a trading market, assets are not transformed but are simply transferred from one investor to another. The field of market microstructure studies the...

This chapter is concerned with the classical applied problem of capital allocation by a corporation whose securities are traded in competitive and frictionless markets. Under reasonable assumptions that are discussed, this amounts to choosing projects whose market value exceeds their cost, so...

The savings/investment process in capitalist economies is organized around bank-like financial intermediaries ("banks[equal, rising dots]), making them a central institution of economic growth. These intermediaries borrow from consumer/savers and lend to companies that need resources for...

Although financial innovation has been an important part of the financial landscape throughout modern economic history, it has received relatively little attention in academia. This essay surveys the existing literature on financial innovation from the disciplines of financial economics,...