Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the firm's assets. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...

I find that an asset's expected return is largely explained by its covariance with intermediary leverage for a broad cross-section of returns. A one-factor leverage model performs as well as standard multi-factor models on most dimensions and in particular helps explain the 30 Industry and 10...

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...