Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

Stablecoins rise to meet the demand for safe assets in decentralized finance. Stablecoin issuers transform risky reserve assets into tokens of stable values, deploying a variety of tactics. To address the questions on the viability of stablecoins, regulations, and the initiatives led by large...

To study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value, we incorporate a widely-used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q-theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk...

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns....

The q-factor model shows strong explanatory power and largely summarizes the cross section of average stock returns. In particular, the q-factor model fully subsumes the Fama-French (2018) 6-factor model in head-to-head factor spanning tests. The q-factor model is an empirical implementation of...

Intangible-intensive firms in the U.S. hold an enormous amount of liquid assets that are in fact short-term debts issued by financial intermediaries. This paper builds a macro-finance model that captures this structure. A self-perpetuating savings glut emerges in equilibrium. As intangibles...

Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

Firms added to the S&P 500 index join a prestigious and exclusive club. They want to fit in the club, which creates a “keeping up with the Joneses” effect. Firms pay more attention to their index peers after inclusion and their investment, external financing, and payouts comove more with...

This paper documents new and empirically important interactions between cash-balance and leverage dynamics. Cash ratios typically vary widely over extended horizons, with dynamics remarkably similar to (and complementary with) those of capital structure. Leverage and cash dynamics interact...

Using detailed project-level data, we document a novel mechanism through which information externalities distort investment. Firms anticipate information spillover from peers’ investment decisions and delay project exercise to learn from their peers’ outcomes. To establish a causal...