"An essential PhD primer on an understudied yet important area of financial markets. Financial markets are complicated, and as we are periodically reminded by confounding market turmoil, it's important to understand how they work and how we can regulate them. The US stock market, which comprises...

We study a canonical model of decentralized exchange for a durable good or asset, where agents are assumed to have time-varying, heterogeneous utility types. Whereas the existing literature has focused on the special case of two types, we allow agents' utility to be drawn from an arbitrary...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model with costly-to-short stocks and heterogeneous beliefs. The closed-form solution to the model shows that costly short sales drive a wedge between the valuation of assets that promise identical cash flows but are subject to different trading...

Perpetual futures are contracts without expiration date in which the anchoring of the futures price to the spot price is ensured by periodic funding payments from long to short. We derive explicit expressions for the no-arbitrage price of various perpetual contracts, including linear, inverse,...

We investigate optimal capital structure and debt maturity policies in the presence of fixed issuance costs. We identify the global-optimal policy that generates the highest values of equity across all states of nature consistent with limited liability. The optimal policy without commitment...