The authors present a model of a financially distressed firm with outstanding bank debt and public debt. Coordination problems among public debtholders introduce investment inefficiencies in the workout process. In most cases, these inefficiencies are not mitigated by the ability of firms to buy...

We examine the investment behavior of firms before and after being spun off from their parent companies. Their investment after the spin-off is significantly more sensitive to measures of investment opportunities (e.g., industry Tobin's "Q"or industry investment) than it is before the spin-off....

We examine two views of the creation of venture-backed start-ups, or "entrepreneurial spawning." In one, young firms prepare employees for entrepreneurship, educating them about the process, and exposing them to relevant networks. In the other, individuals become entrepreneurs when large...

We decompose currency returns into (permanent) intrinsic-value shocks and (transitory) expected-return shocks. We explore interactions between these shocks, currency returns, and institutional-investor currency flows. Intrinsic-value shocks are: dwarfed by expected-return shocks (yet currency...

Stock-market trading is increasingly dominated by sophisticated professionals, as opposed to individual investors. Will this trend ultimately lead to greater market efficiency? I consider two complicating factors. The first is crowding-the fact that, for a wide range of "unanchored" strategies,...

This paper asks how well different organizational structures perform in terms of generating information about investment projects and allocating capital to these projects. A decentralized approach-with small, single-manager firms-is most likely to be attractive when information about projects is...

We model a market populated by two groups of boundedly rational agents: "newswatchers" and "momentum traders." Each newswatcher observes some private information, but fails to extract other newswatchers' information from prices. If information diffuses gradually across the population, prices...

Various theories have been proposed to explain momentum in stock returns. We test the gradual-information-diffusion model of Hong and Stein (1999) and establish three key results. First, once one moves past the very smallest stocks, the profitability of momentum strategies declines sharply with...

What ties together the traditional commercial banking activities of deposit-taking and lending? We argue that since banks often lend via commitments, their lending and deposit-taking may be two manifestations of one primitive function: the provision of liquidity on demand. There will be...

We study the asset pricing implications of learning in an environment in which the true model of the world is a multivariate one, but agents update only over the class of simple univariate models. Thus, if a particular simple model does a poor job of forecasting over a period of time, it is...