This paper extends the Q-theory of investment to capital goods with arbitrary efficiency profiles. When efficiency is non-geometric, the firm’s capital stock and the replacement cost of its assets are fundamentally different aggregates of the firm’s investment history. If capital goods have constant efficiency over a finite useful life, simple proxies are readily available for both the replacement cost of assets in place and capital stock. Under this assumption, we decompose the total investment rate along two dimensions: into its net and replacement components, and into its cash and non-cash components. We show these components exhibit significantly different economic determinants and behavior.

We examine optimal leverage for a downstream firm relying on implicit (self-enforcing) contracts with a supplier. Performing a leveraged recapitalization prior to bargaining increases the firm's share of total surplus. However, the resulting debt overhang limits the range of credible bonuses, resulting in low input quality. Optimal financial structure trades off bargaining benefits of debt with inefficiency resulting from overhang. Consistent with empirical evidence, the model predicts that leverage increases with supplier bargaining power (e.g., unionization rates) and decreases with utilization of non-verifiable inputs (e.g., human capital).

The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) performs poorly overall, as market risk (beta) is weakly related to 24-h returns. This is because stock prices behave very differently with respect to their sensitivity to beta when markets are open for trading versus when they are closed. Stock returns are positively related to beta overnight, whereas returns are negatively related to beta during the trading day. These day-night relations hold for beta-sorted portfolios and individual stocks in the US and internationally as well as for industry and book-to-market portfolios and cash flow and discount rate beta-sorted portfolios. In addition to the change in slope of returns with respect to beta, the implied risk-free rate differs significantly between night and day. Consistent with this, returns on US Treasury futures differ significantly between night and day.

This paper combines daily buy and sell institutional trading volume with all news announcements from Reuters. Using institutional order flow (buy volume minus sell volume) we find a variety of evidence that institutions are informed. Institutional trading volume predicts the occurrence of news announcements. Institutional order flow predicts (i) the sentiment of the news; (ii) the stock market reaction on news announcement days; (iii) the stock market reaction on crisis news days; and (iv) earnings announcement surprises. These results suggest that significant price discovery related to news stories occurs through institutional trading prior to the news announcement date.

Markets can give false impressions of liquidity and stability if failed attempts to trade are ignored. For collateralized loan obligations, we quantify this bias by estimating the total cost of immediacy (TCI) which incorporates failure rates and failure costs. TCI is substantially higher than the observed cost, 0.3–3.8% versus 0.04–0.12% across credit-quality tranches because trade failures are frequent, failure costs are large, and failure costs and rates are correlated. TCI is almost double the realized gains from trade for low-rated tranches. Overall, auction-based over-the-counter markets become illiquid and fragile, especially during stressful periods for low-rated assets.