I study asset price amplification in an asymmetric information model. Entrepreneurs issue debt to finance investments in a physical asset. They have private information about their success probabilities. For a given debt level, higher asset prices require entrepreneurs to invest more of their own funds. This makes bad entrepreneurs more reluctant to mimic good ones; as a result, good entrepreneurs increase their equilibrium leverage and invest more, and this amplifies the initial asset price increase. This model generates predictions about the credit market that are qualitatively consistent with existing evidence. Received April 24, 2015; editorial decision June 15, 2016 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

I study asset price amplification in an asymmetric information model. Entrepreneurs issue debt to finance investments in a physical asset. They have private information about their success probabilities. For a given debt level, higher asset prices require entrepreneurs to invest more of their own funds. This makes bad entrepreneurs more reluctant to mimic good ones; as a result, good entrepreneurs increase their equilibrium leverage and invest more, and this amplifies the initial asset price increase. This model generates predictions about the credit market that are qualitatively consistent with existing evidence.

We document strong weekly lead-lag return predictability across stocks from different industries with no customer-supplier linkages (economically unrelated stocks). Between 1980 and 2010, the industry-neutral long-short hedge portfolio earns an average of over 19 basis points per week. This predictability is related to common institutional ownership and is distinct from previously documented lead-lag effects. Common institutional ownership is a complementary rather than a substitute explanation for return predictability. Information linkages are enough to induce return predictability among stocks in the same industry, but economically unrelated stocks exhibit return predictability only when they have common institutional owners. Our findings suggest that institutional portfolio reallocations can induce return predictability among otherwise unrelated stocks.

Structural estimation of matching games with transferable utility, including matching games of trading networks and many-to-many matching, is increasingly popular in empirical work. I explore several modeling decisions that need to be made when specifying a structural model for a matching game. One decision is the choice of a game theoretic solution concept to impose in the structural model. I discuss pairwise stability, competitive equilibrium, and noncooperative games such as auctions. Another decision is whether to work with a continuum of agents or a finite number of agents. I explore other issues as well.

Homeowners at risk of default face a debt overhang that reduces their incentive to invest in their property: in expectation, some value created by investments in the property will go to the lender. This agency conflict affects housing investments. Homeowners at risk of default cut back substantially on home improvements and mortgage principal payments, even when they appear financially unconstrained. Meanwhile, they do not reduce spending on assets that they may retain in default, including home appliances, furniture, and vehicles. These findings highlight an important financial friction that has stifled housing investment since the Great Recession.

Despite the evidence that full funding of defined benefit pension obligations is value maximizing, managerial price and volatility sensitivities (deltas and vegas) do not appear to influence funded status for all except the CFOs of plan sponsors with weak credit ratings (Anantharaman and Lee, 2014). Whether realized total compensation (as opposed to changes in the value of securities held) encourages full funding is an open question. Here we examine the empirical relation between realized managerial compensation and the extent to which plan liabilities are funded, and find that CEO pay bears a significant relation with funded status.

Accountants making judgments with respect to a particular set of standards are increasingly aware of standards from other reporting regimes that offer additional or conflicting guidance. In fact, IFRS encourages reliance on out‐of‐regime standards when IFRS lacks guidance. This paper reports the results of two experiments which provide evidence that auditors in such circumstances are vulnerable to contrast effects , whereby reporting judgments under IFRS are systematically influenced away from the accounting treatment supported by standards from another regime (U.S. GAAP ). Contrast effects are observed (i) when out‐of‐regime standards are considered before making a reporting judgment under IFRS , and (ii) when out‐of‐regime standards are applied as local GAAP for a subsidiary of a foreign parent that reports under IFRS . We also find that contrast effects are reduced when auditors believe IFRS lacks guidance. These results have implications for financial statement preparers and auditors in the current incomplete‐convergence environment.

We propose a novel approach to measuring firm-level risk exposures and costs of equity. Using a simple consumption-based asset pricing model that explains nearly two-thirds of the variation in average returns across 55 anomaly portfolios, we map the relation between exposures to consumption risk and portfolio-level characteristics. We use this relation to calculate exposures to consumption risk at the firm level and show that the calculated consumption risk exposures yield portfolios with large differences in average returns and ex post consumption risk exposures consistent with those predicted by our calculated betas. Further, industry betas and risk premia implied by our procedure display economically intuitive variation over time. Finally, Fama-MacBeth regressions suggest that risk exposures calculated using our procedure dominate those from alternative factor models at explaining cross-sectional variation in returns.