Despite the size and importance of separately managed accounts (SMAs) and collective investment trusts, their characteristics and performance have not been studied in detail. We show that separate account performance is similar to that of index funds and superior to that of actively managed mutual funds. Management supplies a benchmark for each separate account. When the management-selected benchmark is used to measure performance, performance is significantly overstated. Despite this, investors react to differences in performance from the management-preferred benchmark in choosing among SMAs. Finally we find variables that explain both the cross section of alphas and the cross section of cash flows.

We examine a production-based asset-pricing model with an unobservable mean growth rate following a two-state Markov chain and with an ambiguity-averse representative agent. Our model requires a low coefficient of relative risk aversion to produce: (i) a high equity premium and volatile equity returns, (ii) a low and smooth risk-free rate, (iii) smooth consumption growth and volatile investment growth, (iv) countercyclical equity premium and market price of risk, (v) conditional heteroscedasticity in returns, and (vi) long-horizon predictability of excess returns.

This paper studies the quantitative relevance of the cross-sectional dispersion of corporate financial structure in explaining the intra-industry allocation efficiency of productive factors. I solve a heterogeneous firms model with financial constraints and distortions to the marginal rental-rate of capital, and develop a measure for the intra-industry misallocation of factors of production. The distribution of capital rental rate and two types of firm-level balance sheet characteristics (pledgeability and liquid asset positions) determine the extent of misallocation and industry level total factor productivity (TFP). I calibrate the model using firm-level balance sheet data from seven major industry clusters of the US economy. The counterfactual policy experiments show that weakening the observed balance sheet positions for financially constrained firms leads to a reallocation of production factors from firms with high cost distortions to firms with low cost distortions and cause quantitatively important industry level TFP losses.

Table S9. Alternate control groups. Table S10. Different time horizons. Table S11. Subsample analyses. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

We hypothesize that managers who receive high equity-based compensation have greater incentive to avoid ownership dilution by timing their seasoned equity offers to periods when investors temporarily overvalue their stock. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using a measure of equity-based compensation that reflects the sensitivity of the top five executives’ wealth (based on ownership of stock, options, and restricted shares) to a 1% change in stock price. We find that firms associated with high equity-based compensation for top executives experience abnormally low stock returns and relatively unfavorable changes in operating performance in the three-year period following the issue. Overall, the findings support the premise that managers whose wealth is most sensitive to stock price changes are more likely to act in the interest of current shareholders by issuing equity when they believe their stock is overvalued.

We provide a real-options model of an industry in which agents time abandonment of their projects in an effort to protect their reputations. Agents delay abandonment attempting to signal quality. When a public common shock forces abandonment of a small fraction of projects irrespective of agents' quality, many agents abandon their projects strategically even if they are unaffected by the shock. Such “blending in with the crowd” effect creates an additional incentive to delay abandonment ahead of the shock, leading to accumulation of “living dead” projects, which further amplifies the shock. The potential for moderate public common shocks often improves agents' values.

We consider a dynamic trade-off model of a firm's capital structure with debt renegotiation. Debt holders only accept restructuring offers from equity holders backed by threats which are in the equity holders' own interest to execute. Our model shows that in a complete information model in which taxes and bankruptcy costs are the only frictions, violations of the absolute priority rule (APR) are typically optimal. The size of the bankruptcy costs and the equity holders' bargaining power affect the size of APR violations, but they have only a minor impact on the choice of capital structure.

We document the numerical challenges we experienced estimating random-coefficient demand models as in Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) using two well-known data sets and a thorough optimization design. The optimization algorithms often converge at points where the first- and second-order optimality conditions fail. There are also cases of convergence at local optima. On convergence, the variation in the values of the parameter estimates translates into variation in the models' economic predictions. Price elasticities and changes in consumer and producer welfare following hypothetical merger exercises vary at least by a factor of 2 and up to a factor of 5.

Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information asymmetry, and to some extent management disclosure and financial intermediation, changed at firms affected by this shock. We also examine whether these effects vary as a function of management entrenchment, information processing costs, and required changes to audit committee independence. Our results suggest that firms can alter their corporate transparency to suit the informational demands of a particular board structure.

Job protection and cash benefits are key elements of parental leave (PL) systems. We study how these two policy instruments affect return-to-work and medium-run labour market outcomes of mothers of newborn children. Analysing a series of major PL policy changes in Austria, we find that longer cash benefits lead to a significant delay in return-to-work, particularly so in the period that is job-protected. Prolonged parental leave absence induced by these policy changes does not appear to hurt mothers' labour market outcomes in the medium run. We build a non-stationary model of job search after childbirth to isolate the role of the two policy instruments. The model matches return-to-work and return to same employer profiles under the various factual policy configurations. Counterfactual policy simulations indicate that a system that combines cash with protection dominates other systems in generating time for care immediately after birth while maintaining mothers' medium-run labour market attachment.