The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program provides federally funded research awards to companies with 500 or fewer employees. We explore the differential effects of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR program on firms of various sizes on their future patenting...

We introduce a model that captures the main properties that characterize employee stock options (ESO), in particular, the likelihood of early voluntary exercise and the obligation to exercise immediately if the employee leaves the firm, except if this happens before options are vested, in which...

This paper tests the cross-section implications of quot;keeping up with the Jonesesquot; (KUJ) preferences in an international setting. When agents have KUJ preferences, in the presence of un-diversifiable non-financial wealth, both world and domestic risk (the idiosyncratic component of...

Short squeezes often lead to sudden, large increases in stock prices. We show that uncertainty about the likelihood of a short squeeze is a proxy for skewness-seeking investors, and they use call options in their quest. In particular, these investors are willing to pay a premium for the upside...

We derive a closed-form solution for the optimal portfolio of a nonmyopic utility maximizer who has incomplete information about the alphas or abnormal returns of risky securities. We show that the hedging component induced by learning about the expected return can be a substantial part of the...

The finance literature has shown that option grants can help to screen out low-ability executives. In this paper we develop a framework that allows us to analyze when options are likely to be optimal for this purpose. We consider a dynamic setting with asymmetric information, in which...

We show that a possible explanation for the widespread use of options in compensation contracts might be that they provide a way to screen executives. In particular, we consider the problem of a risk-neutral firm that tries to hire a risk-averse executive. There are several types of executives,...

The finance literature documents a relation between labor income and the cross-section of stock returns. One possible explanation for this is the hedging decisions of investors with relative wealth concerns. This implies a negative risk premium associated with stock returns correlated with local...

In this paper we consider the equilibrium effects of an institutional investor whose performance is benchmarked to an index. In a partial equilibrium setting, the objective of the institutional investor is modeled as the maximization of expected utility (an increasing and concave function, in...

There are a number of recent models that extend the Black and Scholes (1973) model by considering stochastic volatility and/or jumps, and appear to show good empirical performance. In this paper we consider some of the most successful models, all of them belonging to the class of Levy processes,...