Our paper o�ers a minimalist model of a run on a financial market. The prime ingredient is that each risk-neutral investor fears having to liquidate after a run, but before prices can recover back to fundamental values. During the run, only the risk-averse market-making sector is willing to...

This paper explains why seemingly irrational overconfident behavior can persist. Information aggregation is poor in groups in which most individuals herd. By ignoring the herd, the actions of overconfident individuals ("entrepreneurs") convey their private information. However, entrepreneurs...

We model a run on a financial market, in which each risk-neutral investor fears having to liquidate shares after a run, but before prices can recover back to fundamental values. To avoid having to possibly liquidate shares at the marginal postrun price-in which case the risk-averse market-making...

This paper explains why seemingly irrational overconfident behavior can persist. Information aggregation is poor in groups in which most individuals herd. By ignoring the herd, the actions of overconfident individuals ("entrepreneurs") convey their private information. However, entrepreneurs...

Our paper offers a minimalist model of a run on a financial market. The prime ingredient is that each risk-neutral investor fears having to liquidate after a run, but before prices can recover back to fundamental values. During the urn, only the risk-averse market-making sector is willing to...

This paper explains why some firms prefer to pay dividends rather than repurchase shares. When institutional investors are relatively less taxed than individual investors, dividends induce "ownership clientele" effects. Firms paying dividends attract relatively more institutions, which have a...

In our model, financial firms’ leverage choices and asset sales impose negative externalities on other financial firms. This means that individual firms cannot determine their optimal capitalizations in isolation, but have to take the aggregate financial sector characteristics into account. In...

We consider the problem of motivating privately informed managers to engage in entrepreneurial activity to improve the quality of the firm's investment opportunities. The firm's investment and compensation policy must balance the manager's incentives to provide entrepreneurial effort and to...