Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change – and at times becoming increasingly unequally distributed. This leads to tension and confusion...

Using the introduction of high-speed rail as exogenous shocks to costs of information acquisition, we show that reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to a significant increase in information production and improvement in output quality, evidenced by higher frequency of analysts...

We study optimal securitization of defaultable assets in a continuous time setting. A financial intermediary can create a portfolio of defaultable assets and then sell it to outside investors. The default risk of the assets in the portfolio is determined by the unobservable costly effort exerted...

This paper shows that the framework proposed by Barberis and Huang (2009) to incorporate narrow framing and loss aversion into dynamic models of portfolio choice and asset pricing can be extended to also account for probability weighting and for a value function that is convex on losses and...

Mutual funds are mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose information on their investment objectives and risks. In this paper, we study the informational value of U.S. mutual funds' qualitative disclosures by analyzing the content of funds' prospectuses. First, we...

Using the introduction of high-speed rail (HSR) as an exogenous shock to costs of information acquisition, we show that reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to (i) a significant increase in information production, evidenced by a higher frequency of analysts visiting portfolio firms,...