We compare trading in a market with receiving some particular consumption bundle, given increasing state-independent preferences and complete markets. The analysis focuses on the distributional price of the particular bundle. The distributional price is the price of the cheapest...

A number of portfolio strategies followed by practitioners are dominated because they are incompletely diversified over time. The Payoff Distribution Pricing Model is used to compute the cost of following undiversified strategies. Simple numerical examples illustrate the technique, and...

We consider the provision of an optimal warranty in a continuous-time model with two-sided moral hazard. The optimal warranty must balance the producer's durability incentive and the buyer's maintenance incentive. Too little warranty protection gives the producer too much incentive to produce...

The Modigliani and Miller propositions on the irrelevancy of capital structure and dividends are shown to be valid in a large class of models with asymmetric information. The main assumption is that managerial compensation is chosen optimally. This differs from most recent papers on this topic,...

We conduct the first quantitative assessment of federal college subsidies during the 1930s. Overlapping generation households invest in children's education to maximize multigenerational utility, and the government subsidizes college to maximize enrollment subject to a budget constraint and...