I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms' financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise...

We analyze the necessary conditions for a positive relation between the price-earnings ratio (P/E) and expected growth, which is often claimed in financial practice, using the simple Gordon equity valuation model. The conditions are entirely based on observable valuation ratios, specifically the...

Fractional trading (FT)—the ability to trade less than a full share—allows low-budget retail investors to trade high-priced stocks. This paper quantifies FT's impact on retail ownership and trading of high-priced stocks by exploiting its sequential introduction at four brokerage firms since...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This paper identifies five factors that can capture 95% of the variance across 39 US dollar exchange rates based on the principal component method. A time-varying parameter factor-augmented vector autoregressive (TVP-FAVAR) model is used to analyze the determinants of movements in these exchange...

We identify five factors that can capture 95% of the variance across 39 United States (US) dollar exchange rates based on the principal component method. We use a time-varying parameter factor-augmented vector autoregressive model to analyze the determinants of movements in these exchange rates,...

We describe a novel currency investment strategy, the `dollar carry trade,' which delivers large excess returns, uncorrelated with the returns on well-known carry trade strategies. Using a no-arbitrage model of exchange rates we show that these excess returns compensate U.S. investors for taking...

We extract expectations about future economic growth from firms' cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements, and show they predict changes in economic growth rates and foreign exchange rate returns. The predictability is driven by the cross-border M&A announcements of cyclical...

We propose a unified explanation for two seemingly disparate empirical findings: the negative abnormal returns of distressed stocks, and of small growth stocks. Based on a counterintuitive result relating option prices to jump risk (Merton 76), we show via an investment valuation model that...

We propose a unified explanation for two seemingly disparate empirical findings: the negative abnormal returns of distressed stocks, and of small growth stocks. Based on a counterintuitive result relating option prices to jump risk (Merton (1976)), we show via an investment valuation model that...