As a consequence of optimal investment choices, a firm's assets and growth options change in predictable ways. Using a dynamic model, we show that this imparts predictability to changes in a firm's systematic risk, and its expected return. Simulations show that the model simultaneously...

I model strategic interaction among issuers, underwriters, retail investors, and institutional investors when the secondary market has limited price transparency. Search costs for retail investors lead to price dispersion in the secondary market, while the price for institutional investors is...

We study price discovery in municipal bonds, an important OTC market. As in markets for consumer goods, prices "rise faster than they fall." Round-trip profits to dealers on retail trades increase in rising markets but do not decrease in falling markets. Further, effective half-spreads increase...

This paper shows that the existence of managerial ability, combined with the labor contract prevalent in the industry, implies that the closed-end fund discount should exhibit many of the primary features documented in the literature. We evaluate the model's ability to match the quantitative...

In this paper we analyze the theoretical implications of sorting data into groups and then running asset pricing tests within each group. We show that the way this procedure is implemented introduces a bias in favor of rejecting the model under consideration. By simply picking enough groups to...

We derive the optimal labor contract for a levered firm in an economy with perfectly competitive capital and labor markets. Employees become entrenched under this contract and so face large human costs of bankruptcy. The firm's optimal capital structure therefore depends on the trade-off between...