Causal Inference for Asset Pricing
Portfolio choice involves substituting across many assets at once, complicating inference about asset demand. An elementary condition often captures...
The Option Value of Waiting for Institutional Improvement: Real Options and Growth with Endogenous Beliefs
This paper explains why institutional reforms often fail to stimulate investment despite improving long-run fundamentals. We develop a real options...
Bayesian Fama-MacBeth Regressions
Commonly used frequentist estimation methods for linear factor models of asset returns are invalidated by weak and spurious factors. The problem is...
Purifying the Equity Premium
The equity premium has conventionally been defined as the return on stocks minus the return on bills. We decompose this conventional definition into...
Strategic Misreporting and Investment Distortions: How Agency Costs Shape Project Selection and Timing
This paper introduces a dynamic model of corporate investment that integrates misreporting incentives with leverage and growth option timing. Unlike...
Market Fragmentation: Liquidity, Price Discovery, and Welfare
We analyze the impact of financial market fragmentation when traders differ in terms of market access and information about the asset payoff. Agents...
Super-Pledgeability: How Progressive Taxation Solves Entrepreneurial Commitment Problems
This paper provides a novel efficiency rationale for progressive corporate taxation based on commitment problems in entrepreneurial finance. Poor...
Safe Assets as Balance Sheet Multipliers
We highlight the multiplier role of (public) safe assets by studying a model of a bank’s balance sheet. The bank optimally constructs a portfolio of...
Copayments and the Value of Health Insurance: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
How do copayments affect the benefits and costs of health insurance in low-income settings? We study this question in a field experiment in rural...
Market Structure of Intermediation
Skilled intermediaries can represent multiple investors, generating economies of scale in screening costs. However, locating competent intermediaries...
Internal versus External Liquidity: Investment Efficiency under Market Frictions
This paper analyses how firms respond to liquidity shocks when asset prices are endogenously determined through matching frictions. Building on...
The Network Drivers of Trade Currency Invoicing
Using an equilibrium network model and a large international panel of cross-border trade, we analyse empirically the drivers of foreign currency...
Equity Valuation Without DCF
We introduce discounted alpha - a novel framework for equity valuation. By correcting market prices rather than discounting long-horizon cash flows...
Market Information and the Impact of Public Health Insurance on the Private Insurance Market
We analyse how public health insurance affects private insurance markets in mixed public-private systems. Extending the standard selection framework...
Share Issues versus Share Repurchases
Almost all firms repurchase shares through open-market repurchase programs. In contrast, issue methods are more diverse: at-the-market offerings...
Macro Strikes Back: Term Structure of Risk Premia
We provide a novel priced Wold representation that, using the pricing restrictions of a large cross-section of asset returns, sharply identifies...