We study the formation of mutual funds by generalizing the standard competitive noisy rational expectations framework. In our model, informed agents set up mutual funds as a means of selling their private information to uninformed agents. We study the case of imperfect competition among fund...

This article studies equilibrium asset pricing when agents face nonnegative wealth constraints. In the presence of these constraints it is shown that options on the market portfolio are nonredundant securities and the economy's pricing kernel is a function of both the market portfolio and the...

Corporate insiders holding derivative contracts on their firm's stock have an incentive to engage in stock price manipulation. I examine several derivative contracts susceptible to manipulation and the price impact of the insiders' strategic behavior. Digital contracts, the basic building blocks...

Microstructure researchers have long understood that information quality has an effect on price formation in the underlying asset market. However, option researchers have largely ignored the fact that information quality might also impact the options market. This article characterizes the nature...

This article shows how structured financing can be used to solve the asset substitution problem in a dynamic setting. Structuring induces the firm’s owner to optimally choose the first best operating strategy even though the owner’s value function might be locally convex (concave), which...

In this paper we estimate the value of the embedded option in U.S. Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS). The option value exhibits significant time variation that is correlated with periods of deflationary expectations. We use our estimated option values to construct an embedded option...