High-powered incentives may induce higher managerial effort, but they also expose managers to idiosyncratic risk. If managers are risk averse, they might underinvest when firm-specific uncertainty increases, leading to suboptimal investment decisions from the perspective of well-diversified...

I explore the implications for asset prices and macroeconomic dynamics of shocks that improve real investment opportunities and thus affect the representative household's marginal utility. These investment shocks generate differences in risk premia due to their heterogenous impact on firms: they...

We propose a new foundation for the limits to arbitrage based on financial relationships between arbitrageurs and banks. Financially constrained arbitrageurs may choose to seek additional financing from banks who can understand their strategies. However, a hold-up problem arises because banks...

We study daily money market mutual fund flows at the individual share class level during the crisis of September 2008. The empirical approach that we apply to this fine granularity of data brings new insights into the investor and portfolio holding characteristics that are conducive to run-risk...

A recent literature in finance concerns a curious recurring feature of estimated pricing kernels. Classical theory dictates that the pricing kernel { defined loosely as the ratio of Arrow security prices to an objective probability measure { should be a decreasing function of aggregate...

We analyze the effect of innovation on asset prices in a tractable, general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous households and firms. We argue that financial market participants are unlikely to capture all the economic rents resulting from innovative activity, even when they own shares in...

This paper studies the unique risk characteristics of organization capital. Using a stock measure of organization capital based on readily available accounting data, we find that firms with more organization capital relative to their industry peers outperform firms with less organization capital...

a manner consistent with the theory, and helps price the value cross section

A central challenge in asset pricing is the weak connection between stock returns and observable economic fundamentals. We provide evidence that this connection is stronger than previously thought. We use a modified version of the Bry-Boschan algorithm to identify long-run swings in the stock...

We present a model of optimal allocation over liquid and illiquid assets, where illiquidity is the restriction that an asset cannot be traded for intervals of uncertain duration. Illiquidity leads to increased and state-dependent risk aversion, and reduces the allocation to both liquid and...