Part ownership of a takeover target can help a bidder win a takeover auction, often at a low price. A bidder with a toehold bids aggressively in a standard ascending auction because its offers are both bids for the remaining shares and asks for its own holdings. While the direct effect of a...

We investigate the effect of fund size on performance among active mutual funds. We first document that fund returns, both before and after management fees, decline with fund size, even after adjusting performance by various benchmarks and controlling for other fund characteristics such as...

Toeholds have an enormous impact in quot;common-valuequot; takeover battles, such as those between two financial bidders. This contrasts with the small impact of a toehold in a quot;private-valuequot; auction. Our results are consistent with empirical findings that a toehold helps a buyer win an...

We study the impact of transaction costs on portfolio selection and equilibrium asset returns in an economy in which investors who face surprise liquidity shocks invest in liquid and illiquid riskless assets. We find that the portfolio policy and the equilibrium liquidity premium of investors...

The impact of credit quality on swap rates is determined under alternative netting assumptions. With counterparties of different default risk, swap valuation is non-linear in the underlying promised exchange of cash flows. The impact of credit risk asymmetry and of netting is presented through...

We show that credit risk accounts for only a small fraction of yield spreads for investment-grade bonds of all maturities, with the fraction lower for bonds of shorter maturities, and that it accounts for a much higher fraction of yield spreads for high yield bonds. This conclusion is shown to...