This paper identifies a new channel through which bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on non-bankrupt peers. The bankruptcy and liquidation of a retail chain weakens the economies of agglomeration in any given local area, reducing the attractiveness of retail centers for remaining...

We present new archival evidence on the price of vacant land in New York City between 1835 and 1900. Before the Civil War, the price of land per square foot fell steeply with distance from New York's City Hall located in the central business district. After the Civil War, the distance gradient...

The attacks of September 11, 2001, and more recently the Madrid and London downtown train bombings, have raised concerns over both the safety of downtowns and the continuous efforts by terrorists to attack areas of such high density and significance. This article employs building-level data on...

A commonsense and empirically supported approach to explaining metropolitan real house price changes is for the theory to describe an equilibrium price level to which the market is constantly adjusting. The determinants of real house price appreciation, then, can be divided into two groups, one...

The supply/demand of a security in the market is an intertemporal, not a static, object and its dynamics is crucial in determining market participants' trading behavior. Previous studies on the optimal trading strategy to execute a given order focuses mostly on the static properties of the...

Many firms have stockholders who face severe restrictions on their ability to sell their shares and diversify the risk of their personal wealth. We study the costs of these liquidity restrictions on stockholders using a continuous-time portfolio choice framework. These restrictions have major...

The covariance between US Treasury bond returns and stock returns has moved considerably over time. While it was slightly positive on average in the period 1953--2009, it was unusually high in the early 1980''s and negative in the 2000''s, particularly in the downturns of 2000--02 and 2007--09....

We make use of a new database on daily currency fund manager returns over a three-year period, 2005-08. This higher frequency data allows us to estimate both alpha measures of performance and beta style factors on a yearly basis, which in turn allows us to test for persistence. We find no...

We analyze consumption and portfolio behavior in a life-cycle model with realistic borrowing costs and income processes. We show that even a small wedge between borrowing costs and the risk-free return dramatically shrinks the demand for equity. When the cost of borrowing equals or exceeds the...

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...