The widespread and growing use of equity-based compensation has transformed high-skilled labor from a pure labor input to a class of "human capitalists." We show that high-skilled labor earns substantial income in the form of equity claims to firms' future dividends and capital gains....

Banks' ratio of the market value to book value of their equity was close to 1 until the 1990s, then more than doubled during the 1996-2007 period, and fell again to values close to 1 after the 2008 financial crisis. Sarin and Summers (2016) and Chousakos and Gorton (2017) argue that the drop in...

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of complex asset markets with endogenous entry and exit in which the investment technology of investors with more expertise is subject to less asset-specific risk. The joint equilibrium distribution of financial expertise and wealth then determines risk...

We present a simple, linear asset pricing model of the cross section of Mortgage-Backed Security (MBS) returns in which MBS earn risk premia as compensation for their exposure to prepayment risk. We measure prepayment risk and estimate security risk loadings using real data on prepayment...

US data display aggregate external financing and savings waves. Firms can allocate costly external finance to productive capital, or to liquid assets with low physical returns. If firms raise costly external finance and accumulate liquidity, either the cost of external finance is relatively low,...