We show that following a tick size reduction in a decimal public limit order book (PLB) market quality and welfare fall for illiquid but increase for liquid stocks. If a Sub-Penny Venue (SPV) starts competing with a penny-quoting PLB, market quality deteriorates for illiquid, low priced stocks,...

A unified framework for understanding asset prices and aggregate fluctuations is critical for understanding both issues. I show that a real business cycle model with external habit preferences and capital adjustment costs provides one such framework. The estimated model matches the first two...

This paper documents the existence of a CEO Investment Cycle, in which firms disinvest early in a CEO's tenure and increase investment subsequently, leading to "cyclical" firm growth in assets as well as in employment over CEO tenure. The CEO investment cycle occurs for both firings and...

This paper investigates how public equity issuance is related to stock market liquidity. Using quarterly data on IPOs and SEOs in 36 countries over the period 1995-2008, we show that equity issuance is significantly and positively related to contemporaneous and lagged innovations in aggregate...

Average realized returns equal average expected returns plus average unexpected returns. If anomalies are driven by risk, average expected returns should be close to average realized returns. If anomalies are driven by mispricing, unexpected returns should be more important. We estimate...

Miscalibration is a form of overconfidence examined in both psychology and economics. Although it is often analyzed in lab experiments, there is scant evidence about the effects of miscalibration in practice. We test whether top corporate executives are miscalibrated, and study the determinants...

Although firm financial policies were affected by a credit contraction during the recent financial crisis, the impact of increased uncertainty and decreased growth opportunities was stronger than that of the credit contraction per se. From the start of the financial crisis (third quarter of...

The standard dynamic investment model fails to explain the value spread, which is the difference in the market equity-to-capital ratio between extreme book-to-market deciles. Even when the model manages to fit the valuation ratios across some testing assets, the implied expected return errors...

We use a novel identification approach to test whether stock acquirers are overvalued prior to merger announcements or whether they have high growth opportunities (Q-theory). We argue that the overvaluation of firms drives both high short selling activity and a higher likelihood of stock...

This paper examines the connection between the return volatilities of corporate bonds, equities, and Treasuries under the Merton model with stochastic interest rates. Constructing empirical volatilities using bond returns over daily, weekly, and monthly horizons, we find that empirical bond...