Asymmetric shocks are common in markets; securities'; payoffs are not normally distributed and exhibit skewness. This paper studies the portfolio holdings of heterogeneous agents with preferences over mean, variance and skewness, and derives equilibrium prices. A three funds separation theorem...

Litigation finance is a rapidly growing niche asset class focused on debt and equity investments in litigation claims and law firms. We find that in-sample returns in the space have been in excess of 20% annually with limited correlation to other investment areas. This apparent excess return may...

The accuracy of firm information disclosures and the efficiency of long-term investment both play crucial roles in the economy and capital markets. We estimate a dynamic model that captures a trade-off between these two goals that arises when managers confront realistic incentives to misreport...

If financial markets are perfect, the choice of the sources of finance does not influence investment decisions. However, financial markets are considered to be far from perfect. This review concentrates on the role of information asymmetry in determining real investment decisions. Despite the...

We study whether output responds symmetrically to tax increases and decreases in postwar US data, using the identification strategy in Romer and Romer (2010). We find evidence of important asymmetries: the output response to a tax increase is statistically insignificant, but output shows a...