Hedge fund managers are often compensated via management fees on the assets under management (AUM) and incentive fees indexed to the high-water mark (HWM). We develop an analytically tractable model of hedge fund leverage and valuation where the manager maximizes the present value (PV) of future management and incentive fees from current and future managed funds. By leveraging on an alpha strat...

We study a financial model with one risk-free and one risky asset subject to liquidity risk and price impact. In this market, an investor may transfer funds between the two assets at any discrete time. Each purchase or sale policy decision affects the price of the risky asset and incurs some fixed transaction cost. The objective is to maximize the expected utility from terminal liquidation valu...

In this dissertation, I consider a range of topics in bankruptcy, credit risk and asset pricing. The first chapter proposes a structural-equilibrium model to examine some economic implications arising from voluntary filing of Chapter 11. The results suggest that conflict of interests (between debtors and creditors) arising from the voluntary filing option causes countercyclical losses in firm v...

This paper develops a new laboratory test of the hypothesis that individual investors have an irrational preference for selling winning stocks vis-à-vis selling losing stocks. In the experiment, subjects invest in a security that bundles a risky asset, whose price evolves in near-continuous time, with a perpetual put option. Optimal behavior is characterized by an upper and a lower selling thre...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical model of voluntary liquidation. Using the insight from real options literature, we examine the rationale and optimality of US corporate voluntary liquidations for 1990-2000. We test the key predictions from the optimal option exercise boundary. OLS regressions suggest that both the interest effect and the variance effect are at work. However, it s...

We examine whether and why companies prefer fair value to historical cost when they can choose between the two valuation methods. With the exception of investment property owned by real estate companies, historical cost by far dominates fair value in practice. Indeed, fair value accounting is not used for plant, equipment, and intangible assets. We find that companies using fair value accountin...

This paper investigates the e¤ects on the asset market of bank actions in dealing with their non-performing loans. It is demonstrated that liquidation of bad loans may not be as detrimental to asset prices as commonly argued, because funds recouped from liquidation can be recycled into new loans which support the asset market. While capital regulation protects the health of banks, it may limit ...

This article values equity and corporate debt by taking into account the fact that in practice the default point differs from the liquidation point and that it might be in the creditors’ interest to delay liquidation. The article develops a continuous time asset pricing model of debt restructuring which explicitly considers the inalienability of human capital. The study finds that even though i...

5 We compare optimal liquidation policies in continuous time in the presence of trading impact using 6 numerical solutions of Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) partial differential equations (PDE). In par7 ticular, we compare the time-consistent mean-quadratic-variation strategy with the time-inconsistent 8 (pre-commitment) mean-variance strategy. We show that the two different risk measures lead t...