Should an investor unwind his portfolio in the face of changing economic conditions? We study an investor’s optimal trading strategy with finite horizon and transaction costs in an economy that switches stochastically between two market conditions. We fully characterize the investor’s time dependent investment strategy in a ‘‘bull’’ market and a ‘‘bear’’ market. We show that when the market swi...

This paper investigates the interaction among a firm’s knowledge capital, growth opportunities, earning dynamics, and optimal leverage level. Under the corporate taxation and personal taxation framework, by assuming knowledge capital positively affects the realization of a firm’s growth opportunities, I find a positive relation between a firm’s optimal debt level and its knowledge capital. Mean...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms’ leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm’s value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non–financial US firms drawn from the COMPUSTAT qua...

The paper investigates the link between the optimal level of non-financial firms’ shortterm leverage and macroeconomic and idiosyncratic sources of uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm’s value maximization problem that predicts a negative relationship between uncertainty and optimal level of borrowing. This proposition is tested using a panel of non-financial US firms drawn from...

In this paper we investigate the link between optimal level of leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. Using the model of firm’s value maximization, we show that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, captured by an increase in the variability of industrial production or inflation, firms decrease their optimal levels of borrowing. We test this prediction on a panel of non–financial US firms dr...

The mean-variance-leverage (MVL) optimization model (Jacobs and Levy [2012, 2013]) tackles an issue not dealt with by the mean-variance optimization inherent in the general mean-variance portfolio selection model (GPSM) — that is, the impact on investor utility of the risks that are unique to using leverage. Relying on leverage constraints with a conventional GPSM, as is commonly done today, is...

This paper studies the optimal compensation problem between shareholders and the agent in the Leland (1994) capital structure model, and finds that the debt-overhang effect on the endogenous managerial incentives lowers the optimal leverage. Consistent with data, our model delivers a negative relation between pay-performance sensitivity and firm size, and the interaction between debt-overhang a...

Real estate investments are typically characterized by high degrees of leverage and long loan tenures. In perfect capital markets, leverage has no impact on the investment decision apart from tax considerations. However, the mortgage financing market is imperfect in many countries. In the presence of market imperfections, an optimal holding period exists for real property investments. We provid...

Digital inequality, or the unequal access and use of information communication technologies, inhibits under-privileged people from opportunities in the digital world. Although government and private organizations have devoted considerable resources to address this inequality, issues remain unsolved. A theory-based investigation of the phenomenon is essential for effective policy-making and inte...

The traditional estimation of mixture regression models is based on the normal assumption of component errors and thus is sensitive to outliers or heavy-tailed errors. A robust mixture regression model based on the t−distribution by extending the mixture of t−distributions to the regression setting is proposed. However, this proposed new mixture regression model is still not robust to high leve...