The consequences of information differences across investors in capital markets are still much debated. This paper examines the relation between information differences across investors and the cost of capital, and makes three points. First, in models of perfect competition, information...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

This paper develops and tests the hypothesis that accounting rules mitigate the effect of tax policy on firm investment decisions by obscuring the timing of tax payments. I model a firm that maximizes a discounted weighted average of after-tax cash flows and accounting profits. I estimate the...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

This paper illustrates that evaluating alternate abatement polices that affect the growth path of an economy on the basis of their effects on asset valuation may not be welfare enhancing. We show that the class of abatement polices considered in the integrated assessment literature are robust...

Adding a return factor based on capital investment into standard, calendar-time factor regressions makes underperformance following seasoned equity offerings largely insignificant and reduces its magnitude by 37-46%. The reason is that issuers invest more than nonissuers matched on size and...

We develop and analyze a model of a multi-stage investment project that captures many features of R&D ventures and start-up companies. An important feature these problems share is that the firm learns about the potential profitability of the project throughout its life, but that research and...

This paper explores the question of whether hedge funds engage in front-running strategies that exploit the predictable trades of others. One potential opportunity for front-running arises when distressed mutual funds -- those suffering large outflows of assets under management -- are forced to...

Building on neoclassical reasoning, we propose a new multi-factor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity. The neo- classical three-factor model outperforms traditional factor models in explaining the average returns across...

More financially constrained firms are riskier and earn higher expected returns than less financially constrained firms, although this effect can be subsumed by size and book-to-market. Further, because the stochastic discount factor makes capital investment more procyclical, financial...