We quantify the effect of financial leverage on stock return volatility in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with debt and equity claims. We study the effects of financial leverage on the market portfolio, and on a small firm with idiosyncratic and market risk. In an economy with both a...

Investment is often irreversible, especially at the aggregate level. This paper proposes and solves a general equilibrium model of technology adotpion when investment in the new technlogy is irreversible. In contrast to prior research, we consider a setup where the returns on technology adoption...

Consider a collection of agents with stochastically fluctuating heterogeneous endowments. It seems natural that credit is the appropriate market mechanism for insuring such fluctuations: individuals save when endowment is high, and deplete their savings or borrow when their endowment is low. The...

When financial markets are incomplete, shareholders will in general disagree on the optimal level of investment to be undertaken by the firm (Grossman and Hart, 1979). Macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets (e.g. Krusell and Smith, 1998) usually ignore this issue...

This paper suggests a solution to the puzzling finding documented in Moskowitz and Vissing-Jorgensen (2002) that the return to an index of private equity is equal to the return to the CRSP index of public equity even though investment in private firms is substantially riskier. It presents an...

Interest rate swaps are among the most popular derivative contracts. With an interest rate swap, fixed interest payments are exchanged for payments linked to a floating rate. In this paper we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study corporate debt financing and the use of...

A central puzzle for asset pricing theory is that stock prices are much more volatile than corporate dividends. One possible resolution is to modify standard models by introducing stochastic discount factors that induce large variation in prices for relatively smooth sequences of dividends. But...