Knowledge that Transforms

We study the asset pricing implications of an economy where solvency constraints are endogenously determined to deter agents from defaulting while allowing as much risk sharing as possible. We solve analytically for efficient allocations and for the corresponding asset prices, portfolio holdings, and solvency constraints for a simple example. Then we calibrate a more general model to U.S. aggregate as well as idiosyncratic income processes. We find equity premia, risk premia for long-term bonds, and Sharpe ratios of magnitudes similar to the U.S. data for low risk aversion and a low time-discount factor.

In this article we examine the effect of the imperfect mobility of goods on international risk sharing and, through that, on the investment in risky projects, welfare, and growth. Our main result is that the welfare gain from integration of financial markets is not greatly reduced by the presence of goods market imperfections, modeled as a cost of transferring goods from one country to the other. We also find that the gain is nonmonotonic with respect to investors' risk aversion and the aggregate volatility of output growth. The policy implication to be drawn is that financial market integration is a worthwhile goal to pursue even when full goods mobility has not been achieved

In this article we ask: what kind of information and how much of it should firms voluntarily disclose? Three types of disclosures are considered. One is information that complements the information available only to informed investors (to-be-processed complementary information). The second is information that is orthogonal to that which any investor can acquire and thus complements the information available to all investors (preprocessed complementary information). And the third is information that substitutes for the information of the informed investors in that it reveals to all what was previously known only by the informed (substitute information). Our main results are as follows. First, in equilibrium, all types of firms voluntarily disclose all three types of information. Second, in contrast to the existing literature, complementary information disclosure by firms strengthens investors' private incentives to acquire information. Substitute information disclosure weakens private information acquisition incentives. Third, while complementary information disclosure has an ambiguous effect on financial innovation incentives, substitute information disclosure weakens those incentives.

This article presents a new methodology for testing economic restrictions on the price schedules offered in a limit order book that are based on (i) break-even conditions for marginal limit orders and (ii) rational updating conditions for order book revisions over time. Using order flow data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange, I find strong evidence of insufficient depth in the limit order books relative to the theoretical predictions. An extended model, which allows the model parameters to depend on market conditions, captures some of the systematic variation in the observed order book depth.

This article shows how both technological and competitive risks affect the timing of private and initial public offerings in an emerging industry. Early private financing occurs in industries that are perceived to be risky, with high development costs and low probability of being displaced by technologically superior rivals. Early public financing occurs in industries perceived to be viable, with low development costs and low probability of displacement. Due to feedback effects between financial and product markets, the value of investors' proprietary information is greater in private than in initial public offerings. This has implications for underpricing.

This article investigates the interaction between market entry, company foreclosure, and capital structure in a duopoly. We find that the order in which firms foreclose is determined not only by differences in firm-specific factors, but also by common economic factors, such as the interest rate and the market profit volatility. We extend the exit model by allowing financially distressed firms to renegotiate their debt contracts through a one-off debt exchange offer. We find that firms with high bankruptcy costs or with prospects of profit improvement can get bigger reductions on their debt repayments. Investigating market entry, we find that financial vulnerability of the incumbent induces earlier entry.

Shareholders of a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) tend to live in the area which it serves, and an RBOC's customers tend to hold its shares rather than other RBOCs' equity. The geographic bias of the RBOC investors is closely related to the general tendency of households' portfolios to be concentrated, of employees' tendency to own their employers' stocks in their retirement accounts, and to the home country bias in the international arena. Together, these phenomena provide compeling evidence that people invest in the familiar while often ignoring the principles of portfolio theory.

The optimal portfolio strategy is developed for an investor who has detected an asset pricing anomaly but is not certain that the anomaly is genuine rather than merely apparent. The analysis takes account of the fact that the parameters of both the underlying asset pricing model and the anomalous returns are estimated rather than known. The value that an investor would place on the ability to invest to exploit the apparent anomaly is also derived and illustrative calculations are presented for the Fama and French SMB and HML portfolios, whose returns are anomalous relative to the CAPM.

This study examines whether rates of information flow differ between trading and non-trading periods, and whether the variances of pricing errors differ at the open and close of trading. The approach improves on existing methods by allowing for correlation between pricing errors and information flow, and by conducting inferences at the individual security level. The daytime rate of information flow is about seven times the overnight rate, and the variances of pricing errors at the open are not different from those at the close of trading. This evidence differs from existing results based on return variance ratios.

This article offers a new class of models for the term structure of forward interest rates. We allow each instantaneous forward rate to be driven by a different stochastic shock, but constrain the shocks so that the forward rate curve is kept continuous. We term the shocks to the forward curve "stochastic string shocks," and construct then as solutions to stochastic partial differential equations. This article offers a variety of parameterizations that can produce, with parsimony, any correlation pattern among forward rates of different maturities. We derive the no-arbitrage condition on the drift of forward rates shocked by stochastic strings and show how to price interest rate derivatives. Although derivatives can be easily priced, they can be perfectly hedged only by trading in an infinite number of bonds of all maturities. We show that the strings model is consistent with any panel dataset of bond prices, and does not require the addition of error terms in econometric models. Finally, we empirically calibrate some versions of the model and price the delivery option embedded in long bond futures. We show that the delivery option is much more valuable in string models than in a similar one-factor model. This is due to the greater variety of shapes of the term structure that string models can produce, which induces more changes in the cheapest-to-deliver bond.