We value a firm that pays its cash flows to equity through share repurchases in a dynamic environment where personal taxes are paid on capital gains upon realization. The cost of capital is reduced by approximately 0.8% through the use of repurchases relative to dividends. We use the empirical distribution of pre-tax free cash flows in Fama and French (1999) to evaluate the tradeoffs between the costs of financial distress, the personal-tax advantages of equity, and the corporate-tax advantage to debt. The optimal capital structure is interior with a 3% bankruptcy cost.

Municipal bonds trade in decentralized broker-dealer markets, and are underpriced when issued, but unlike equities the average price rises slowly over several days. Newly issued municipal bonds have high levels of price dispersion and the average price rises because the mix of trade sizes changes over time. While large trades occur close to the reoffering price, small trades occur between the reoffering price to as much as 5% above the reoffering price. Using a mixed-distribution model we quantify the losses uninformed traders or issuers give up to broker-dealers.

When investors disagree, speculation between them alters equilibrium prices in financial markets. Because managers maximize firm value given financial market prices, disagreement alters firms' value-maximizing investment policies. Disagreement therefore impacts aggregate investment, consumption, and output. In a production economy with recursive preferences and disasters, we demonstrate that static disagreement among investors generates dynamic aggregate investment that is positively correlated with capital shocks, leading to stochastic volatility in aggregate consumption, investment, and equity returns. The direction of these effects is consistent with business cycle facts, and with several features of the 2008 financial crisis.