We study an institutional investment problem in which a centralized decision maker, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO), for example, employs multiple asset managers to implement investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn, allocate...

We use exogenous variation in tax benefit functions to estimate firm-specific cost of debt functions that are conditional on company characteristics such as collateral, size, and book-to-market. By integrating the area between the benefit and cost functions, we estimate that the equilibrium net...

We propose a latent variables approach within a present-value model to estimate the expected returns and expected dividend growth rates of the aggregate stock market. This approach aggregates information contained in the history of price-dividend ratios and dividend growth rates to predict...

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...

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...