We develop a dynamic contingent-claim framework to model S. Myers’s idea that a firm is a collection of growth options and assets in place. The firm’s composition between assets in place and growth options evolves endogenously with its investment opportunity set and its financing of growth options, as well as its dynamic leverage and default decisions. The firm trades off tax benefits with the potential financial distress and endogenous debt-overhang costs over its life cycle. Unlike the standard capital structure models of Leland, our model shows that financing and anticipated endogenous default decisions have significant implications of firms’ growth-option exercising decisions and leverage policies. The firm’s ability to use risky debt to borrow against its assets in place and growth options substantially influences its investment strategies and its value. Quantitatively, we find that the firm consistently chooses conservative leverage in line with empirical evidence in order to mitigate the debt-overhang effect on the exercising decisions for future growth options. Finally, we find that debt seniority and debt priority structures have both conceptually important and quantitatively significant implications on growth-option exercising and leverage decisions as different debt structures have very different debt-overhang implications.

Hedge fund managers trade off the benefits of leveraging on the alpha-generating strategy against the costs of inefficient fund liquidation. In contrast to the standard risk-seeking intuition, even with a constant-return-to-scale alpha-generating strategy, a risk-neutral manager becomes endogenously risk-averse and decreases leverage following poor performance to increase the fund's survival likelihood. Our calibration suggests that management fees are the majority of the total compensation. Money flows, managerial restart options, and management ownership increase the importance of high-water-mark-based incentive fees but management fees remain the majority. Investors' valuation of fees are highly sensitive to their assessments of the manager's skill.

We investigate whether the performance of private equity (PE) investments is sufficient to compensate investors (LPs) for risk, long-term illiquidity, management, and incentive fees charged by the general partner (GP).We analyze the LPs’ portfolio-choice problem and find that management fees, carried interest, and illiquidity are costly, and GPs must generate substantial alpha to compensate LPs for bearing these costs. Debt is cheap and reduces these costs, potentially explaining the high leverage of buyout transactions. Conventional interpretations of PE performance measures appear optimistic. On average, LPs may just break even, net of management fees, carry, risk, and costs of illiquidity.

We investigate an alternative economic channel of a positive relationship between risk and compensation, as documented by Cheng et al. (2015). We propose that when information asymmetry exists, firms generally seek to use compensation as a signal of their CEOs’ ability. The risks arising from information asymmetry tend to encourage firms to pay higher compensation to their CEOs in a pattern of financial incentives we call the “Lake Wobegon effect”. However, when individual firms pursue complete signaling, a higher equilibrium compensation level can be achieved. This paper explores the factors that give rise to the “Lake Wobegon effect” and the learning process by which this effect can be counterbalanced over time (Hayes and Schaefer, 2009).

We develop an incomplete-markets q-theoretic model to study entrepreneurship dynamics. Precautionary motive, borrowing constraints, and capital illiquidity lead to underinvestment, conservative debt use, under-consumption, and less risky portfolio allocation. The endogenous liquid wealth-illiquid capital ratio w measures time-varying financial constraint. The option to accumulate wealth before entry is critical for entrepreneurship. Flexible exit option is important for risk management purposes. Investment increases and the private marginal value of liquidity decreases as w decreases and exit becomes more likely, contrary to predictions of standard financial constraint models. We show that the idiosyncratic risk premium is quantitatively significant, especially for low w.

We model the welfare consequences of mandates that restrict investors to hold firms with net-zero carbon emissions. To qualify for these mandates, value-maximizing firms have to accumulate decarbonization capital. Qualification lowers a firm’s required return by its decarbonization investments divided by Tobin’s q, that is, the greenium or the dividend yield shareholders forgo to address the global-warming externality. The welfare-maximizing mandate approximates the first-best solution, yielding welfare gains compared to laissez-faire by mitigating the weather disaster risks resulting from carbon emissions. Our model generates optimal transition paths for decarbonization that we use to evaluate proposed net-zero targets.

We study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value by incorporating a widely used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk information to predict investments when empirical measurement issues of Tobin’s average q are significant (e.g., equity is much more likely to be mis-priced than debt), as in Philippon (2009). We find, consistent with our theory, that credit spreads and bond q have significant predictive powers on micro-level and aggregate investments corroborating the recent empirical work of Gilchrist and Zakrajšek (2012). We also show that the quantitative effects of the stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment, Tobin’s average q, the duration and user cost of capital, and the value of growth opportunities are substantial. These findings are particularly important in today’s low interest rate environment.