Without sacrificing tractability, we analyze the effect of fat-tailed events such as catastrophes on the optimal compensation contract between a principal and an agent. The optimal contract depends on all the moments and not just the variance

Evidence shows that firms market time their debt maturity. Specifically, maturity is found to be inversely proportional to the term spread (the difference between long and short-term Treasury yield). That is, firms issue short-term debt when the term spread is large and they increase maturity as...

We present a durable consumption-based asset pricing model with Epstein-Zin preferences and the pricing kernel accommodating the long-run consumption risk. Consumption growth includes a small predictable component as in Bansal and Yaron (2004). The model is estimated with simple econometric...

This paper analyzes the optimal investment strategy of two firms confronted with the option to adopt a new technology. I add two key features: location and learning. A firm gains relative advantage entirely due to its geographic placement - this is the location benefit. Firms also learn from the...