Firms' inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value. Shareholders would instead choose to increase leverage...

We examine the pervasive view that "equity is expensive," which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious, irrelevant to the policy debate by confusing private...

An impatient and risk-neutral government can sell bonds at any time to a more patient group of competitive lenders. The key problem: the government cannot commit to either a particular financing strategy, or a default strategy. Despite risk-neutrality, in equilibrium debt adjusts slowly towards...

We consider a privately informed issuer which holds a portfolio of assets that can be sold to raise cash, where the fractions of assets sold serve as a multidimensional signal. If good news about one asset is good news for the others, then there is a unique equilibrium that satisfies the...

We study a principal-agent setting in which both sides learn about future profitability from output, and the project can be abandoned/terminated if profitability is too low. With learning, shirking by the agent both reduces output and lowers the principal's estimate of future profitability. The...