This article starts by unveiling a strong empirical regularity: multinational corporations exhibit higher stock market returns and earning yields than nonmultinational firms. Within nonmultinationals, exporters exhibit higher earning yields and returns than firms selling only in their domestic market. To explain this pattern, we develop a real option value model where firms are heterogeneous in productivity and have to decide whether and how to sell in a foreign market where demand is risky. Selling abroad is a source of risk exposure to firms: following a negative shock, they are reluctant to exit the foreign market because they would forgo the sunk cost they paid to enter. Multinational firms are the most exposed because of the higher costs they have to pay to invest. The calibrated model is able to match both aggregate U.S. export and foreign direct investment data, and the observed cross-sectional differences in earning yields and returns.

We develop and solve a model of optimal portfolio choice with transaction costs and predictability in house prices. We model house prices using a process with a time-varying expected growth rate. Housing adjustments are infrequent and characterized by both the wealth-to-housing ratio and the expected growth in house prices. We find that the housing portfolio share immediately after moving to a more valuable house is higher during periods of high expected growth in house prices. We also find that the share of wealth invested in risky assets is lower during periods of high expected growth in house prices. Finally, the decrease in risky portfolio holdings for households moving to a more valuable house is greater in high-growth periods. These findings are robust to tests using household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) surveys. The coefficients obtained using model-simulated data are consistent with those obtained in the empirical tests.