An entrepreneur faces non-diversifiable business risk and liquidity constraints. We provide a unified framework that embeds these frictions to study interdependent business start-up/entry, capital accumulation/asset sales, portfolio allocation, consumption/saving, and business exit decisions....

We develop a model of pandemic risk management and firm valuation. We introduce aggregate transmission shocks into an epidemic model and link valuations to infections by using an asset-pricing framework that accounts for vaccines. Infections lower earnings growth but firms can mitigate damages....

We develop a dynamic incomplete-markets model of entrepreneurial firms, and demonstrate the implications of non-diversifiable risks for entrepreneurs' interdependent consumption, portfolio allocation, financing, investment, and business exit decisions. We characterize the optimal capital...

The separation of ownership and control allows controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits. We develop an analytically tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study asset pricing and welfare implications of imperfect investor protection. Consistent with empirical...

Entrepreneurs often face undiversifiable idiosyncratic risks from their business investments. Motivated by this observation, we extend the standard real options approach to investment to an incomplete markets environment and analyze the joint decisions of business investments, consumption-saving...

This paper provides a model of investment timing by managers in a decentralized firm in the presence of agency conflicts and information asymmetries. When investment decisions are delegated to managers, contracts must be designed to provide incentives for managers to both extend effort and...

I study the agent's optimal consumption-saving and portfolio choice decisions when he cannot fully insure his income shocks and does not know his income growth rate. I show that the agent rationally saves for precaution against the risk of estimating his income growth, in addition to his...

The real options framework has been used extensively to analyze the timing of investment under uncertainty. While standard real options models assume that agents possess a constant rate of time preference, there is substantial evidence that agents are very impatient about choices in the...

Many economic decisions can be described as an option exercise or optimal stopping problem under uncertainty. Motivated by experimental evidence such as the Ellsberg Paradox, we follow Knight (1921) and distinguish risk from uncertainty. To afford this distinction, we adopt the multiple-priors...

The recent law and finance literature following Shleifer and Vishny (1997) and La Porta, Lopez-de Silanes, and Shleifer (1998) argues that the expropriation of minority shareholders by controlling shareholders is at the core of agency conflicts in most countries. While much empirical evidence...