Disclosure by firms would seem to reduce investment inefficiency by reducing informational asymmetry. However, the impact of disclosure is endogenous and depends on incentives within the firm. Given optimal renegotiation-proof contracts, disclosing only accepted contracts does not solve the...

Oliver Hart proved the impossibility of deriving general comparative static properties in portfolio weights. Instead, we derive new comparative statics for the distribution of payoffs: A is less risk averse than B iff Aʼs payoff is always distributed as Bʼs payoff plus a non-negative random...

In this paper we analyze the optimal contract for a portfolio manager who can exert effort to improve the quality of a private signal about future market prices. We assume complete markets over states distinguished by asset payoffs and place no restrictions on the form of the contract. We show...

Retirement flexibility and inability to borrow against future labor income can significantly affect optimal consumption and investment. With voluntary retirement, there exists an optimal wealth-to-wage ratio threshold for retirement and human capital correlates negatively with the stock market...

Neoclassical financial models provide the foundation for our understanding of finance. This chapter introduces the main ideas of neoclassical finance in a single-period context that avoids the technical difficulties of continuous-time models, but preserves the principal intuitions of the...