Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication in mutual fund markets. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the...

Traditional theories argue that governance is strongest under a single large blockholder, as she has high incentives to undertake value-enhancing interventions. However, most firms are held by multiple small blockholders. This article shows that, while such a structure generates free-rider...

We model the impact of public and private ownership structures on firms' incentives to invest in innovative projects. We show that it is optimal to go public when exploiting existing ideas and optimal to go private when exploring new ideas. This result derives from the fact that private firms...

This article studies performance-sensitive debt (PSD), the class of debt obligations whose interest payments depend on some measure of the borrower's performance. We demonstrate that the existence of PSD obligations cannot be explained by the trade-off theory of capital structure, as PSD leads...

We develop a theoretical model to analyze the effects of libertarian paternalism on information production and financial decision making. Individuals in our model appreciate the information content of the recommendations made by a social planner. This affects their incentive to gather...