We use a dynamic model of financing decisions to measure agency conflicts for a large panel of 12,652 firms from 14 countries. Our estimates show that agency conflicts are large and vary significantly across firms and countries. Differences in agency conflicts are largely due to differences in...

In order to identify the relevant sources of firms' financing constraints, we ask what financial frictions matter for corporate policies. To that end, we build, solve, and estimate a range of dynamic models of corporate investment and financing, embedding a host of financial frictions. We focus...

We quantify agency conflicts induced by the separation of ownership and control in large public firms by means of structural estimation. We use a simulated method of moments estimator (SMM) to back out the structural parameters of a q-theoretic dynamic agency model of firms from observed...

We use a dynamic model of cash management in which firms face competitive pressure to show that competition increases corporate cash holdings as well as the frequency and size of equity issues. In our model, these effects are driven by small, financially constrained firms, in contrast with the...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

How does product life cycle affect investment and financing? To answer this question, we structurally estimate a dynamic model where the firm chooses product portfolio characteristics that influence cash flow dynamics and shape corporate policies. In the model, the firm trades off higher...

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert’s behavior. It is well known that, in general, various reward functions can lead to the...