The debt-to-GDP ratio negatively predicts cumulative nominal consumption growth up to a 10-year horizon, resulting from the ratio’s ability to forecast lower inflation and real growth. Moreover, the debt-to-GDP ratio is positively associated with yield spreads. I rationalize these facts in a model in which positive shocks to government debt cause lower inflation and growth, making bonds attractive assets. Furthermore, because longer-term bonds are less exposed to current debt shock than are shorter-term bonds, they are better hedges, resulting in high yield spreads in high-debt states. The model highlights the importance of fiscal risk in understanding the Treasury bond market.

Low-income households with proximate access to payday loans exhibit greater economic distress, higher take-up of food assistance benefits, and greater delinquency on child support payments than peers without proximate loan access. These findings suggest that borrowing can exacerbate distress, leading borrowers to use transfer programs and to prioritize payday loan payments over other liabilities like child support. In that way, payday lending produces negative externalities—costs imposed on taxpayers that fund transfer programs and nonresident family members that fail to receive child support. Received August 13, 2014; editorial decision December 5, 2016 by Editor Alexander Ljungqvist.

I study asset price amplification in an asymmetric information model. Entrepreneurs issue debt to finance investments in a physical asset. They have private information about their success probabilities. For a given debt level, higher asset prices require entrepreneurs to invest more of their own funds. This makes bad entrepreneurs more reluctant to mimic good ones; as a result, good entrepreneurs increase their equilibrium leverage and invest more, and this amplifies the initial asset price increase. This model generates predictions about the credit market that are qualitatively consistent with existing evidence. Received April 24, 2015; editorial decision June 15, 2016 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

I study asset price amplification in an asymmetric information model. Entrepreneurs issue debt to finance investments in a physical asset. They have private information about their success probabilities. For a given debt level, higher asset prices require entrepreneurs to invest more of their own funds. This makes bad entrepreneurs more reluctant to mimic good ones; as a result, good entrepreneurs increase their equilibrium leverage and invest more, and this amplifies the initial asset price increase. This model generates predictions about the credit market that are qualitatively consistent with existing evidence.

[When agents can learn about their abilities as active investors, they rationally "trade to learn" even if they expect to lose from active investing. The model used to develop this insight draws conclusions that are consistent with empirical study of household trading behavior: Households' portfolios underperform passive investments; their trading intensity depends on past performance; and they begin by trading small sums of money. Using household data from Finland, the article estimates a structural model of learning and trading. The estimated model shows that investors trade to learn even if they are pessimistic about their abilities as traders. It also demonstrates that realized returns are significantly downward-biased measures of investors' true abilities.]

[Strategic alliances are long-term contracts between legally distinct organizations that provide for sharing the costs and benefits of a mutually beneficial activity. In this paper, I develop and test a model that helps explain why firms sometimes prefer alliances over internally organized projects. I introduce managerial effort into a model of internal capital markets and show how strategic alliances help overcome incentive problems that arise when headquarters cannot pre-commit to particular capital allocations. The model generates a number of implications, which I test using a large sample of alliance transactions in conjunction with Compustat data.]

Bakshi and Chen (1996b) suggest that the spirit of capitalism affects stock prices by increasing society's aversion to risk. In this article, I show that the way in which the spirit of capitalism impinges upon asset prices depends on the interaction of impatience, willingness to substitute over time, and ordinal preferences between consumption and status, in addition to risk aversion. I develop a general model that charts the channels through which the spirit of capitalism affects asset prices. An increase in the capitalist spirit may increase or decrease risk aversion, and may actually decrease the prices of risky assets.

Brokerage contracts for many categories of real assets are characterized by a common, constant commission rate payable upon sale, exclusive agency, and contractual asking prices. For a large market in steady state, these conventional contracts produce in equilibrium no agency problem between a broker and his clients. Each broker spends the same time or effort selling each client's asset as the broker would spend on his own assets. As in standard agency problems, extra effort by a broker generates first-order stochastically dominant distributions of bids by potential buyers. Unlike standard agency problems, each broker can allocate his time or effort between selling the assets of his multiple clients and searching for new clients in competition with other brokers. Because brokers' time spent searching for new sellers is dissipative, entry by brokers is excessive in equilibrium.

[Brokerage contracts for many categories of real assets are characterized by a common, constant commission rate payable upon sale, exclusive agency, and contractual asking prices. For a large market in steady state, these conventional contracts produce in equilibrium no agency problem between a broker and his clients. Each broker spends the same time or effort selling each client's asset as the broker would spend on his own assets. As in standard agency problems, extra effort by a broker generates first-order stochastically dominant distributions of bids by potential buyers. Unlike standard agency problems, each broker can allocate his time or effort between selling the assets of his multiple clients and searching for new clients in competition with other brokers. Because brokers' time spent searching for new sellers is dissipative, entry by brokers is excessive in equilibrium.]

Markets for many real assets are characterized by sequential search followed by bilateral bargaining between matched buyers and sellers. For a category of real assets, the joint, intertemporal valuation problems of buyers, owners, and sellers, and the associated Nash pricing function are solved explicitly. In equilibrium, the average transaction price is a noisy, proportional random walk, and the liquidity premium is positive for matched owners. Depending on the values of the parameters, the liquidity premium can be substantial. In a related problem of optimal development with costly search, the optimal exercise point, cost of development, and value of the undeveloped asset are calculated analytically. With search, development can occur sooner and undeveloped assets have lower market values than the standard solution without search.