We quantify the impact of merger activity on productive efficiency. We develop and calibrate a dynamic industry-equilibrium model that features mergers, entry, and exit by heterogeneous firms. Mergers affect productivity directly through realized synergies, and indirectly through firms'...

I show that an asset pricing model for the equity claims of a value-maximizing firm can be constructed from its optimal financial contracting behavior. I study a dynamic contracting model in which firms trade off the costs and benefits of a given promise to pay external lenders in a specific...

The optimal investment-dividend policy of a financially constrained firm whose earnings are subject to additive shocks is shown to exhibit several stylized economic and financial features of the firm life cycle which usually require considerably more complex models. This parsimonious model...

When investors have incomplete information, expected returns, as measured by an econometrician, deviate from those predicted by standard asset pricing models by including a term that is the product of the stock's idiosyncratic volatility and the investors' aggregated forecast errors. If...

Using a dynamic model of financing, investment, and macroeconomic risk, we investigate when firms sell assets to fund investments (financing asset sales) across the business cycle. Equity financed investment transfers wealth from equity to debt because asset volatility declines and earnings...

We solve the problem of optimal inventory management for a CARA market-maker who faces proportional transaction costs and marking to market. Our model accommodates inventory shocks following an arbitrary compound Poisson process, and allows us to link the optimal policy to the moment-generating...

Our objective is to identify the trading strategy that would allow an investor to take advantage of excessive stock price volatility and sentiment fluctuations. We construct a general-equilibrium model of sentiment. In it, there are two classes of agents and stock prices are excessively volatile...

We develop a method that allows one to compute incomplete-market equilibria routinely for Markovian equilibria (when they exist). The main difficulty to be overcome arises from the set of state variables. There are, of course, exogenous state variables driving the economy but, in an incomplete...

We develop a tractable model to study the macroeconomic impacts of limited arbitrage by linking arbitrage activities with the macroeconomy through collateralization. We show that the interactions between speculative trading and the business cycle can work as a powerful transmission mechanism,...

We investigate the channel through which fluctuations in the market liquidity of real-sector repo collateral cause arbitrage crashes and failure of systemically important intermediaries during the global financial crisis. Intermediaries pledge productive capital as repo collateral to fund the...