Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. Whether dealers in such a market operate competitively is an empirical issue, but a difficult one to study because data in such markets is generally not centrally recorded. We...

We compute the value of a firm that pays its cash flows each period through share repurchases in a dynamic environment where personal taxes are paid on realized capital gains and dividends. These results provide a measure of the personal tax advantages of equity financing relative to debt...

Swedish lottery bonds offer a unique opportunity to study ex-day effects in an environment where cash distributions are tax advantaged relative to capital gains. Thus, in the lottery bond market, we observe a reversal of the preference for capital

Bonds are traded in OTC markets, where opacity and fragmentation imply large transaction costs for retail investors. Is there something special about bonds, in contrast to stocks, that precludes trading in transparent, limit-order markets? Historical experience suggests this is not the case....

An explicit expression for a firm's expected return is developed in a dynamic model of investment at the firm level. Each period, the firm has an option to invest. Past investment decisions account for the firm's existing asset base which is assumed

We develop and analyze a model of a multi-stage investment project that captures many features of R\&D ventures and start-up companies. An important feature these problems share is that the firm learns about the potential profitability of the project t

Prior to the subprime crisis, mortgage brokers charged higher percentage fees for loans that turned out to be riskier ex post, even when conditioning on other risk characteristics. High conditional fees reveal borrower attributes that are associated with high borrower risk, such as suboptimal...

We quantify the effect of financial leverage on stock return volatility in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with debt and equity claims. The effect of financial leverage is studied both at a market and a firm level where the firm is exposed to both idiosyncratic and market risk. In a...

We study the way in which information about corporate decisions is reflected in stock prices. In the corporate finance literature a typical assumption is that managers have superior information that is revealed to the market by their corporate decisions and personal equity trades. In contrast,...

We use a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium economy with heterogeneous beliefs to study the effects of a short--selling constraint on stock prices, stock price volatility, and interest rates. We find large stock price and volatility effects from heterogeneous beliefs, without introducing...