Between 2001 and 2007, the complexity of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) increased substantially. The median size of commercial mortgage loan pools tripled and the median number of AAA-rated tranches doubled. I examine whether deal complexity is related to loan performance by analyzing a sample of approximately 40,000 commercial mortgage loans from 334 CMBS deals. I find that loan performance is worse for loans in more complex securitizations. However, neither the price of a deal’s securities nor a deal’s risk retention reflected that complexity correlates with lower loan quality. These findings present a challenge for theories of optimal security design.

We examine whether equity issuances initial public offerings (IPOs) and seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) are in part driven by investor sentiment by using equity mutual fund flows to proxy for the rational and/or irrational components of aggregate demand for equity. We find that more firms issue equity when flows are higher and repurchase equity when flows are lower. More firms file with the Securities Exchange Commission when predicted flows in the expected issuance month are greater. Price revisions are positively related to contemporaneous flows and unexpected flows. Initial returns are positively related to contemporaneous flows only for IPO issuances. These results are driven by retail, and not institutional, flows. Our evidence suggests that investor sentiment partially drives equity issuances.

We investigate whether a firm’s directors’ and officers’ liability insurance contract at the time of the IPO is related to insured firms’ first year post-IPO performance. We find that insurers charge a higher premium per dollar of coverage to protect the directors and officers of firms that will subsequently have poor first year post-IPO stock performance. A higher price of coverage is also associated with a higher post-IPO volatility and lower Sharpe ratio. Our results are robust to various econometric specifications and suggest that even when the high level of information asymmetry inherent to the IPO context prevails, insurers have information about the firms’ prospects that should be valuable to outside investors.

We survey theoretical and empirical research on antitakeover provisions, focusing on the relation between antitakeover provisions and shareholder value. We divide the empirical studies based upon the evidence that they provide: short-term event studies, studies on performance and policy changes around adopting antitakeover provisions or passing state antitakeover laws, studies on the impact of antitakeover provisions on takeovers, studies on the relation between antitakeover provisions and firm characteristics, and long-term studies on the relation between antitakeover provisions and firm performance or policies. We also discuss the place of antitakeover provisions in the current debate about “good governance” practices.

We develop a decentralized Bayesian model of college admissions with two ranked colleges, heterogeneous students, and two realistic match frictions: students find it costly to apply to college, and college evaluations of their applications are uncertain. Students thus face a portfolio choice problem in their application decision, while colleges choose admissions standards that act like market-clearing prices. Enrollment at each college is affected by the standards at the other college through student portfolio reallocation. In equilibrium, student-college sorting may fail: weaker students sometimes apply more aggressively, and the weaker college might impose higher standards. Applying our framework, we analyse affirmative action, showing how it induces minority applicants to construct their application portfolios as if they were majority students of higher caliber.

This paper empirically examines how CEO optimism affects earnings smoothing and earnings surprises. The main finding is that optimistic managers smooth earnings more than rational managers and are associated with smaller (in absolute value) earnings surprises. A possible theoretical explanation is offered for these results based on a combination of the “torpedo effect,” the innate behavior of optimists, and the risk of litigation/prosecution for over-reporting earnings.

We review the main identification strategies and empirical evidence on the role of expectations in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, paying particular attention to the issue of weak identification. Our goal is to provide a clear understanding of the role of expectations that integrates across the different papers and specifications in the literature. We discuss the properties of the various limited-information econometric methods used in the literature and provide explanations of why they produce conflicting results. Using a common dataset and a flexible empirical approach, we find that researchers are faced with substantial specification uncertainty, as different combinations of various a priori reasonable specification choices give rise to a vast set of point estimates. Moreover, given a specification, estimation is subject to considerable sampling uncertainty due to weak identification. We highlight the assumptions that seem to matter most for identification and the configuration of point estimates. We conclude that the literature has reached a limit on how much can be learned about the New Keynesian Phillips curve from aggregate macroeconomic time series. New identification approaches and new datasets are needed to reach an empirical consensus.