We investigate the effects of manager characteristics on capital structure in a structural model. We implement the manager’s optimal contracts through financial securities that lead to a dynamic capital structure, which reflects the effects of taxes, bankruptcy costs, and manager-shareholder...

We develop a dynamic principal–agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect...

We document empirical support for a key micro-level channel—innovation by young, private firms—through which financial sector deregulation affects economic growth. We find that intrastate banking deregulation, which increased the local market power of banks, decreased the level and risk of...

We examine the dynamic forecasting behavior of security analysts in response to their prior performance relative to their peers within a continuous time/multi-period framework. Our model predicts a U-shaped relationship between the boldness of an analyst's forecast, that is, the deviation of her...

We develop an arbitrage-free and complete framework to price options on the stocks of firms involved in a merger or acquisition deal allowing for the possibility that the deal might be called off at an intermediate time, creating discontinuous impacts on the stock prices. Our model can be a...

We develop a unified model of the interactions among investors, fund companies, and fund managers. We show that the interplay between a manager's incentives from her compensation structure and career concerns leads to a nonmonotonic (approximately U-shaped) relation between her risk choices and...

We examine the financing choices of undiversified owner-managers in a continuous-time model. Managers' financing choices as well as their dynamic equity stakes, which trade off their private benefits and the costs they incur due to their lack of diversification, are simultaneously and...

We analyze 582 R&D agreements between Air Force agencies and outside partners. Agenices choose partners and contractual terms consistent with predictions from a rational model, which suggests that they could be incentive efficient from an ex ante perspective.