Multinational subsidiaries are generally financed with a mixture of internal debt and equity from the parent corporation. Yet, financial theory has relatively little to say regarding the debt-equity tradeoff and the timing of dividend repatriation in an international setting. In this paper, we derive optimal rules for financing multinational subsidiaries that take into account tax rate differentials and the exploitation of tax-loss credits. We develop a formal multi-period dynamic model to characterize the optimal dividend repatriation policy and the optimal choice of debt-equity mix. The model generates several testable empirical implications that are consistent with available empirical evidence and several others that have not been either discussed or empirically tested in the literature.

We document persistent superior trading performance among a subset of individual investors. Investors classified in the top performance decile in the first half of our sample subsequently earn risk-adjusted returns of about 6% per year. These returns are not confined to stocks in which the investors are likely to have inside information, nor are they driven by illiquid stocks. Our results suggest that skilled individual investors exploit market inefficiencies (or perhaps conditional risk premiums) to earn abnormal profits, above and beyond any profits available from well-known strategies based on size, value, momentum, or earnings announcements. (JEL G11, G14, G40, G51) Received: October 11, 2020 Editorial decision: January 4, 2021 Editor: Jeffrey Pontiff

The strong bias in favor of domestic securities is a well‐documented characteristic of international investment portfolios, yet we show that the preference for investing close to home also applies to portfolios of domestic stocks. Specifically, U.S. investment managers exhibit a strong preference for locally headquartered firms, particularly small, highly levered firms that produce nontraded goods. These results suggest that asymmetric information between local and nonlocal investors may drive the preference for geographically proximate investments, and the relation between investment proximity and firm size and leverage may shed light on several well‐documented asset pricing anomalies.

The central insight of asset pricing is that a security's value depends both on its distribution of payoffs across economic states and on state prices. In fixed income markets, many investors focus exclusively on estimates of expected payoffs, such as credit ratings, without considering the state of the economy in which default occurs. Such investors are likely to be attracted to securities whose payoffs resemble economic catastrophe bonds—bonds that default only under severe economic conditions. We show that many structured finance instruments can be characterized as economic catastrophe bonds, but offer far less compensation than alternatives with comparable payoff profiles.

This article studies information blockages and the asymmetric release of information in a security market with fixed setup costs of trading. In this setting, “sidelined” investors may delay trading until price movements validate their private signals. Trading thereby internally generates the arrival of further news to the market. This leads to (1) negative skewness following price run-ups and positive skewness following price rundowns (even though the model is ex ante symmetric), (2) a lack of correspondence between large price changes and the arrival of external information, and (3) increases in volatility following large price changes.

We develop a performance evaluation approach in which a fund manager's skill is judged by the extent to which the manager's investment decisions resemble the decisions of managers with distinguished performance records. The proposed performance measures use historical returns and holdings of many funds to evaluate the performance of a single fund. Simulations demonstrate that our measures are particularly useful in ranking managers. In an application that relies on such ranking, our measures reveal strong predictability in the returns of U.S. equity funds. Our measures provide information about future fund returns that is not contained in the standard measures.