Many seemingly discordant results are reconciled if firm-specific return volatility is characterized as the intensity with which firm-specific events occur. A functionally efficient stock market allocates capital to its highest value uses, which often amounts to financing Schumpeterian creative...

We examine the role of patents as signals used to reduce information asymmetries in entrepreneurial finance. A theoretical model gives conditions for a unique separating equilibrium in which startup founders file for patents to signal invention quality to investors, as well as appropriating...

China is the world’s largest investor and greatest contributor to global economic growth by wide margins, and will remain so for many years. The efficiency of its financial system in allocating capital to investment will be important to sustain this growth. This paper shows that China’s...

The "Masters Hypothesis" is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure from new financial index investors created a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices at various times in recent years. This paper analyzes the market impact of financial index investment in agricultural futures...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. stocks in the OTC market. As little is known about this market, we first characterize OTC firms by trading venue and provide evidence on survival, success, frequency of venue changes, reporting status, and trading activity. A large...

This paper presents direct evidence for relational contracts in sovereign bank lending. Unlike the existing empirical literature, its instrumental variables method allows for distinguishing a direct influence of past repayment problems on current spreads (a "punishment" effect in prices) from an...

We study the joint determination of fund managers' contracts and equilibrium asset prices. Because of agency frictions, investors make managers' fees more sensitive to performance and benchmark performance against a market index. This makes managers unwilling to deviate from the index and...

Feedback from stock prices to cash flows occurs because information revealed by firms' stock prices influences the actions of competitors. We explore the implications of feedback within a noisy rational expectations setting with incumbent publicly traded firms and privately held new entrants. In...

Over-the-counter (OTC) stocks are far less liquid, disclose less information, and exhibit lower institutional holdings than listed stocks. We exploit these different market conditions to test theories of cross-sectional return premiums. Compared to premiums in listed markets, the OTC illiquidity...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...