We document that corporates in emerging markets borrow more in foreign currency when the local currency provides a better hedge in downturns. We develop an international corporate finance model in which firms facing adverse selection choose the foreign currency share of their debt. In the unique...

I develop a dynamic model of financing decisions and optimal debt maturity choice in which creditors face adverse selection and learn about the firm's quality from news. In equilibrium, shareholders may choose to postpone debt issuance to reduce adverse selection and improve the pricing of newly...

I explore the effect of the threat posed by low-cost competitors on debt structure in the airline industry. I use the route network expansion of low-cost airlines to identify routes where the probability of future entry increase dramatically. I find that when a large portion of their market is...

Models of capital structure and credit risk make predictions about market valuations of debt, but are routinely tested on the basis of book debt from common data sources. In this paper, we propose to close this gap. We construct a rich data set on firm level debt market valuations by carefully...

Using the first reported case of COVID-19 in a given US county as the event day, firms headquartered in an affected county experience an average 27 bps lower return in the 10-day post-event. This negative effect nearly doubles in magnitude for firms in counties with a higher infection rate (-50...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model provides a “lookalike” Modigliani-Miller equation that predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is...

We use machine learning methods to predict stock return volatility. Our out-of-sample prediction of realised volatility for a large cross-section of US stocks over the sample period from 1992 to 2016 is on average 44.1% against the actual realised volatility of 43.8% with an R2 being as high as...

We develop a penalized two-pass regression with time-varying factor loadings. The penalization in the first pass enforces sparsity for the time-variation drivers while also maintaining compatibility with the no arbitrage restrictions by regularizing appropriate groups of coefficients. The second...

This chapter surveys theoretical research on the long-term performance of fixed-mix investment strategies. These self-financing strategies rebalance the portfolio over time so as to keep constant the proportions of wealth invested in various assets. The main result is that wealth can be grown...

This paper presents an equilibrium model in a pure exchange economy when investors have three possible sources of heterogeneity. Investors may differ in their beliefs, in their level of risk aversion and in their time preference rate. We study the impact of investors heterogeneity on the...