We examine the neoclassical investment model using a panel of U.S. manufacturing firms. The standard model with no financing constraints cannot be rejected for firms with high (pre-sample) dividend payouts. However, it is decisively rejected for firms with low (pre-sample) payouts (firms we...

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of internal vs. external capital allocation. We focus primarily on comparing an internal capital market to bank lending. While both represent centralized forms of financing, in the former case the financing is owner-provided,...

We study rollover risk and collateral value in a dynamic asset pricing model with endogenous debt financing by extending the framework of Geanakoplos (2009) with a generic binomial tree and time-varying heterogeneous beliefs. Optimistic borrowers face rollover risk if the belief dispersion...

The leverage effect refers to the generally negative correlation between an asset return and its changes of volatility. A natural estimate consists in using the empirical correlation between the daily returns and the changes of daily volatility estimated from high-frequency data. The puzzle lies...

We propose a unified model of limited market integration, asset-price determination, leveraging, and contagion. Investors and firms are located on a circle, and access to markets involves participation costs that increase with distance. Despite the ex-ante symmetry of investors, their strategies...

Suppose that a firm receives a cash windfall which does not change its investment opportunity set, or equivalently its marginal Tobin's Q. What will this firm do with the money? We provide empirical answers to this question using a sample of firms with such windfalls in the form of a won or...

We present a simple framework that incorporates a role for "interest rate spreads" in models of investment fluctuations. Formally, we develop a simple model of investment and financial contracting under asymmetric information that can he used to generate an Euler equation describing firms'...