This paper analyzes the early exercise of exchange‐traded options by different classes of investors over the 1996 to 1999 period. A large number of exercises are identified as clearly irrational without invoking any model of market equilibrium. Customers of discount brokers and customers of fullservice brokers both engage in a significant number of irrational exercises while traders at large investment houses exhibit no irrational early exercise behavior. Rational and irrational exercise is triggered for discount and full‐service customers by the underlying stock price attaining its highest level over the past year and by high returns on the underlying stock.

This paper offers a new explanation for the prevalent use of convertible securities in venture capital finance. Convertible securities can be used to endogenously allocate cash‐flow rights as a function of the state of the world and the entrepreneur's effort. This property can be used to induce the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist to invest efficiently into the project. The result is robust to renegotiation and to changes in the timing of investments and information flows. The model is consistent with the observations that conversion is often automatic and that convertible securities are rarely used by outside investors.

We study optimal financial contracting for centralized and decentralized firms. Under centralized contracting, headquarters raises funds on behalf of multiple projects. Under decentralized contracting, each project raises funds separately on the external capital market. The benefit of centralization is that headquarters can use excess liquidity from high cash‐flow projects to buy continuation rights for low cash‐flow projects. The cost is that headquarters may pool cash flows from several projects and self‐finance follow‐up investments without having to return to the capital market. Absent any capital market discipline, it is more difficult to force headquarters to make repayments, which tightens financing constraints ex ante. Cross‐sectionally, our model implies that conglomerates should have a lower average productivity than stand‐alone firms.

Prior empirical evidence regarding the impact of dividend taxes on firm valuation is mixed. This study avoids some of the complications encountered in previous empirical work by exploiting institutional characteristics of REITs, such as their limited discretion over dividend policy and the relative transparency of REIT assets. We regress the market value of equity on the market value of assets and tax basis, which creates tax deductions that lower future dividend taxes without affecting future pretax cash flow. We find that firm value is positively related to tax basis, suggesting that future dividend taxes are capitalized into share prices.

We investigate the relation between founding‐family ownership and firm performance. We find that family ownership is both prevalent and substantial; families are present in one‐third of the S&P 500 and account for 18 percent of outstanding equity. Contrary to our conjecture, we find family firms perform better than nonfamily firms. Additional analysis reveals that the relation between family holdings and firm performance is nonlinear and that when family members serve as CEO, performance is better than with outside CEOs. Overall, our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that minority shareholders are adversely affected by family ownership, suggesting that family ownership is an effective organizational structure.

We examine whether macroeconomic risk can explain momentum profits internationally. Neither an unconditional model based on the Chen, Roll, and Ross (1986) factors nor a conditional forecasting model based on lagged instruments provides any evidence that macroeconomic risk variables can explain momentum. In addition, momentum profits around the world are economically large and statistically reliable in both good and bad economic states. Further, these momentum profits reverse over 1‐ to 5‐year horizons, an action inconsistent with existing risk‐based explanations of momentum.

We study the daily and intradaily cross‐sectional relation between stock returns and the trading of institutional and individual investors in Nasdaq 100 securities. Based on the previous day's stock return, the top performing decile of securities is 23.9% more likely to be bought in net by institutions (and sold by individuals) than those in the bottom performance decile. Strong contemporaneous daily patterns can largely be explained by net institutional (individual) trading positively (negatively) following past intradaily excess stock returns (or the news associated therein). In comparison, evidence of return predictability and price pressure are economically small.

We provide evidence that firms attempting IPOs condition offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering on the experience of their primary market contemporaries. Moreover, while initial returns and IPO volume are positively correlated in the aggregate, the correlation is negative among contemporaneous offerings subject to a common valuation factor. Our findings are consistent with investment banks implicitly bundling offerings subject to a common valuation factor to achieve more equitable internalization of information production costs and thereby preventing coordination failures in primary equity markets.