I show that relative levels of aggregate consumption and personal oil consumption provide anexcellent proxy for oil prices, and that high oil prices predict low future aggregate consumptiongrowth. Motivated by these facts, I add an oil consumption good to the long-run risk model of Bansal and...

This dissertation documents the positive relationship between financial distress and equity issuance and shows that dilution explains the low stock returns of distressed firms. When the cross-section of firms is sorted by degree of distress, the value-weighted mean of the monthly net issuance...

The first chapter “Investment Patterns in Singapore’s Central Provident Fund System” investigates how plan participants in a national defined contribution system invest their pension accumulations. I find that only a small fraction of participants elects to invest in outside investment...

My dissertation aims at understanding the financing and investment decisions of firms. It contains two chapters.Chapter One studies the currency composition of debt for firms in emerging economies. Using a dataset of traded Mexican firms, I document two stylized facts about firms in the...

What is the cross-sectional relationship between financial leverage and expected equity returns? How is the empirical relationship associated with firm's financial decisions? This dissertation investigates the potential explanations for the flatness relation between financial leverage and...

Chapter 1 analyzes hybrid-trigger CAT bonds, a new CAT bond deal that can reduce basis risk and eliminate moral hazard simultaneously. It is the first research that provides analytical evidence on the condition under which the hybrid trigger has lower basis risk. Simulation results support my...

I investigate: (i) Agency problems between debt and equity holders, and their impact on capital structure and investment policy; (ii) Agency problems between firm managers and capital providers.The first chapter, "Investment and Financing under Reverse Asset Substitution", shows that banks place...

There has been a substantial amount of interest recently in long-range planning. One necessary component of the long-range plan Is the long-range forecast. In contrast to the emphasis on the planning process, however, little attention has been given to forecasting. This study considers the...

This paper utilizes a new data set from AllianceBernstein that, unlike other corporate governance data, has country-level and monthly-updated firm-level governance ratings for 22 emerging markets countries for almost a five year period. With these data we examine the relationship of firm-level...

There is a general recognition that there are deficiencies in the Mundell-Fleming model. Nonetheless, Rose [2000] has stated that Mundell was the first to exposit the Policy Trilemma, which identifies an intrinsic incompatibility among: high capital mobility, fixed exchange rates, and monetary...