Asset prices display high covariance relative to the covariance of their payoffs. (Pindyck and Rotemberg, 1993; Barberis, Shleifer and Wurgler, 2002) Many take this ‘excess covariance’ to be evidence of investor irrationality. This model reconciles the high covariance with a rational...

We propose a theory of unsecured debt that is based on the existence of private information about a person's type and on the fact that some debtors have the incentive to forego bankruptcy in order to signal their type. The theory formalizes the idea that the type of a person is relevant to...

The q-theory explanations of asset pricing anomalies are quantitatively important. We perform a new asset pricing test by using GMM to minimize the difference between average stock returns in the data and average investment returns constructed from observable firm characteristics. Under various...

Evidence of stock return predictability by financial ratios is still controversial, as documented by inconsistent results for in-sample and out-of-sample regressions and by substantial parameter instability. This paper shows that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if the...

Empirical methods in corporate finance for some time focused on the short-term market reaction to corporate announcements. The associated theories rely heavily on market imperfections such as taxes, transaction costs, information issues and contracting problems to obtain short-term market...

It is commonly thought that a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is so, one might ask how much data is a piece of advice worth. In other words, if advice is important than we should be able to measure it in two ways: How much data would a rational decision maker be willing to give up in...

This paper provides a general framework for pricing of real options in continuous time for wide classes of payoff streams that are functions of Levy processes. As applications, we calculate the option values of multi-stage investment/disinvestment problems (sequences of embedded options, which...