We develop a dynamic capital structure model to study how manager-shareholders agency conflicts affect the joint determination of financing and investment decisions. We show that the consumption of private benefits channel leads managers not only to choose a lower optimal leverage, but also to...

Heterogeneous-agents asset pricing theories imply that stockholders' consumption has the first-order effect on equity premium. Motivated by these theories, we evaluate the performance of the conditional CCAPM in explaining time-variation in market returns and cross-sectional variation in...

We estimate the costs of financial distress prior to default (pre-default costs) separately from the loss incurred at default (the loss given default) using a dynamic trade-off model of capital structure. We document that pre-default costs are on average equal to 6.5% of firm value per year. We...

We conduct a novel survey of 2,548 nationally representative U.S. respondents to estimate subjective risk-return trade-offs in savings, government bonds, stocks, real estate, gold, and cryptocurrencies. We document a robust negative relationship between respondents’ perceptions of the risk and...