Knowledge that Transforms

This paper extends Merton Miller's 1977 analysis of corporate capital structure decisions to the incomplete capital markets case. As in Miller's model, aggregate demand for corporate leverage is curtailed as interest rates on taxable bonds rise. Unlike Miller's model, however, capital structure is not a matter of indifference to all equilibrium shareholders. Market incompleteness and tax arbitrage restrictions combine to prevent marginal rates of substitution from being equalized for all investors and hence their preferences are not unanimous. In addition, costs associated with debt induce a tendency for lower cost firms to issue a larger proportion of total corporate debt.

This paper examines the implications of microstructure theory for empirical research on stock price behavior

In placing a new security issue, an investment banker has an opportunity to obtain private information by conducting preselling activities during the registration period. The task of the issuer is to design a contract that both induces the banker to use this information to the issuer's advantage and provides a disincentive for the banker to price the issue too low in order to reduce the effort required to sell the issue. This paper characterizes the class of price response functions that the issuer can induce the banker to choose under a delegation scheme and demonstrates that delegating the pricing decision to the banker can be optimal.