A major governance problem in closely-held corporations arising from the illiquidity of shares is the majority shareholders’ expropriation of minority shareholders. As a solution, legal and finance research recommends that the main shareholder surrender some control to minority shareholders via ownership rights. We test this proposition on a large dataset of closely-held corporations. We find t...

To study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value, we incorporate a widely-used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q-theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk information to predict investments when empirical measurement issues of Tobin’s average q are significant (e...

In most public companies in China, there are two thirds of shares that cannot be traded freely in the secondary market. These illiquid shares, however, may be allowed to circulate unexpectedly one day. This paper delves into the investor’s financial decisionmaking with restricted stock in a continuous-time framework. Accordingly, this paper assumes that removal of trade restriction arrives as a...

T recent financial crisis highlights the importance of market crashes and the subsequent market illiquidity for optimal portfolio selection. We propose a tractable and flexible portfolio choice model where market crashes can trigger switching into another regime with a different investment opportunity set. We characterize the optimal trading strategy in terms of coupled integro-differential equ...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through a single statistics, and asks whether liquidity should be regulated given that a capital adequacy req...

Liquidity providers in a security often use prices of other securities as a source of information to set their quotes. As a result, liquidity is higher when prices are more informative. In turn, prices are more informative when liquidity is higher. We show that this self-reinforcing relationship between price informativeness and liquidity is a source of contagion and fragility: a small drop in ...