Abstract Mandatory convertibles, which are equity-linked hybrid securities that automatically convert to common stock on a pre-specified date, have become an increasingly popular means of raising capital in recent years (about $20 billion worth issued in 2001 alone). This paper presents the...

There is evidence that suppliers have private information about their customers' credit risk. Yet, interest rates in trade credit markets are usually industry-not-firm specific. Why? If the demand for intermediate products is inelastic, suppliers should raise interest rates until they reach...

We study how heterogeneous beliefs affect returns and examine whether heterogeneous beliefs are a priced factor in traditional asset pricing models. To accomplish this task, we suggest new empirical measures based on the disagreement among analysts about expected (short-term and long-term)...

Most investors purchase securities knowing they will resell those securities in the future. Uncertainty about the preferences of future trading counter-parties causes randomness in future resale prices that we call liquidity risk. It is natural to suppose that investors are asymmetrically...

``Limits of Arbitrage" theories require that the marginal investor in a particular asset market be a specialized arbitrageur. Then the constraints faced by this arbitrageur (i.e. capital constraints) feed through into asset prices. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of the US stock market using fractional integration techniques. We implement a version of the tests of Robinson (1994a), which enables one to consider unit (or fractional) roots both at the zero (long-run) and at the cyclical...

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when...

In this paper we ask the empirical question are bond covenants priced? Consistent with the Costly Contracting Hypothesis (CCH) developed by Smith and Warner (1979), we find that they are. We document a negative relation between the promised yield on corporate debt issues and the presence of...

Venture capitalists enjoy incentive-laden compensation schemes where they are paid a fixed amount (management fees) plus a share of profit (success fees). This scheme is of course intended to provide venture capitalists with strong incentives under the heavy information asymmetry (Sahlman, 1982,...

We examine the dynamic forecasting behavior of security analysts in response to their prior performance relative to their peers within a continuous time/multi-period framework. Our model predicts a U-shaped relationship between the boldness of an analyst's forecast, that is, the deviation of her...