This paper studies the valuation of assets with debt tax shields when debt policy is a general time-dependent function of the asset's unlevered cash flows, value, and history. In a continuous-time setting, it shows that the value of a project's debt tax shield satisfies a partial differential...

We study the role played by "bond book-to-market" ratios in U.S. corporate bond pricing. Controlling for numerous risk factors tied to default and priced asset risk, including yield-to-maturity, we find that the ratio of a corporate bond's book value to its market price strongly predicts the...

This study analyzes the role that two psychological attributes--sensation seeking and overconfidence--play in the tendency of investors to trade stocks. Equity trading data are combined with data from an investor's tax filings, driving record, and psychological profile. We use the data to...

This study analyzes the automobile purchase behavior of all residents of two Finnish provinces over several years. It finds that a consumer's purchases are strongly influenced by the purchases of his neighbors, particularly purchases in the recent past and by neighbors who are geographically...

A model of security design based on the principle of information aggregation and alignment is used to show that (i) firms needing to finance their operations should issue different securities to different groups of investors in order to aggregate their disparate information and (ii) each...

An analysis of trades in the Finnish stock market around the turn of the year shows that Finnish investors tend to realize losses more than gains towards the end of December. They also buy back the same stocks they recently sold, with a repurchase rate that depends on the size of the capital...

Multihorizon temporal relationships between stock returns are complex due to confounding sources of return premia, microstructure effects, and changes in the relationship over various horizons. We find the relation to be further complicated by the sign and consistency of the past return that...

Prior experimental and empirical research documents that many investors have a lower propensity to sell those stocks on which they have a capital loss. This behavioral phenomenon, known as 'the disposition effect,' has implications for equilibrium prices. We investigate the temporal pattern of...

We use an iterative relocation algorithm to identify factors in common stock returns. The benefit of the approach is that factors are portfolios of assets with non-negative weights. As a result, they are readily interpreted in terms of their characteristics of the underlying securities. The...

Cross-sectional forecasts of conservative and optimistic biases in analyst earnings estimates predict a stock's future returns, especially for firms that are hard to value. Trading strategies--whether based on the component of analyst bias that is correlated with major return anomalies or the...