This study provides evidence that highly leveraged owner‐managed properties liquidated assets during the commercial real estate decline of the late 1980s, and that this provided buying opportunities for better capitalized buyers. The analysis documents significant financial distress costs for highly leveraged firms during an industry‐wide downturn and shows that these costs are particularly large for owner‐managed firms.

This work compares a dealer market and a limit-order book. Dealers commonly observe order flow and collect information from multiple market orders. They may be better informed than other traders, although they do not earn rents from this information. Dealers earn rents as suppliers of liquidity and their decisions to enter or exit the market are independent of the degree of adverse selection. Introduction of a limit-order book lowers the execution-price risk faced by speculators and leads them to trade more aggressively on their information. Introduction of the book also lowers dealer profits but increases the informational efficiency of prices.

The authors develop a model in which the mode of acquisition conveys information concerning the value of the bidder. The model incorporates the possibility that offers containing both cash and stock can be made in a setting consistent with the U.S. tax code. The authors demonstrate that bidders with unfavorable private information about their equity value choose offers containing some stock to avoid the capital gains tax on sequences of cash offers. The model yields a number of unique predictions about the construction of acquisition offers. The authors present evidence consistent with the model.

We develop a model in which the mode of acquisition conveys information concerning the value of the bidder. The model incorporates the possibility that offers containing both cash and stock can be made in a setting consistent with the U.S. tax code. We demonstrate that bidders with unfavorable private information about their equity value choose offers containing some stock to avoid the capital gains tax consequences of cash offers. The model yields a number of unique predictions about the construction of acquisition offers. We present evidence consistent with the model.

A new representation of nonmarketable (NM) income is introduced in this essay. Using this representation and continuous trading, there exists a set of individuals who do not participate in the asset market and who consume at the rate of nonmarketable income derived from human capital. Because these individuals remain nonparticipants for a range of stochastic processes governing the NM income, consumption betas are not generally unique in value and the consumption‐based CAPM (CCAPM) does not obtain. However, the intertemporal CAPM (ICAPM) of Merton remains valid.

A new representation of nonmarketable (NM) income is introduced in this essay. Using this representation and continuous trading, there exists a set of individuals who do not participate in the asset market and who consume at the rate of nonmarketable income derived from human capital. Because these individuals remain nonparticipants for a range of stochastic processes governing the NM income, consumption betas are not generally unique in value and the consumption-based CAPM (CCAPM) does not obtain. However, the intertemporal CAPM (ICAPM) of Merton remains valid.

This work compares a dealer market and a limit-order book. Dealers commonly observe order flow and collect information from multiple market orders. They may be better informed than other traders, although they do not earn rents from this information. Dealers earn rents as suppliers of liquidity, and their decisions to enter or exit the market are independent of the degree of adverse selection. Introduction of a limit-order book lowers the execution-price risk faced by speculators and leads them to trade more aggressively on their information. Introduction of the book also lowers dealer profits, but increases the informational efficiency of prices.

This work compares a dealer market and a limit‐order book. Dealers commonly observe order flow and collect information from multiple market orders. They may be better informed than other traders, although they do not earn rents from this information. Dealers earn rents as suppliers of liquidity, and their decisions to enter or exit the market are independent of the degree of adverse selection. Introduction of a limit‐order book lowers the execution‐price risk faced by speculators and leads them to trade more aggressively on their information. Introduction of the book also lowers dealer profits, but increases the informational efficiency of prices.

Utility‐based models of asset pricing may be estimated with or without assuming a distribution for security returns; both approaches are developed and compared here. The chief strength of a parametric estimator lies in its computational simplicity and statistical efficiency when the added distributional assumption is true. In contrast, the nonparametric estimator is robust to departures from any particular distribution, and it is more consistent with the spirit underlying utility‐based asset pricing models since the distribution of asset returns remains unspecified even in the empirical work. The nonparametric approach turns out to be easy to implement with precision nearly indistinguishable from its parametric counterpart in this particular application. The application shows that log utility is consistent with the data over the period 1926–1981.