Over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of initiatives seeking to mobilize investor voice towards positive social impact. In this paper, I provide a framework outlining the role of investors as stewards of the commons. While... View Details

Early-stage financing from angel investors is critical to the success of high-growth startups. Recent estimates suggest that annual US angel investment activity may total as much as $24 billion each year, contributing to the growth and success of more than 64,000... View Details

We explore a new mechanism by which investors take correlated shortcuts and present evidence that managers undertake actions—in the form of sales management—to take advantage of these shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision wherein a firm’s primary... View Details

Sunil Nagaraj, Triangulate's founder had spent a few years trying to launch a dating application that matched users based on their behavior on social media. Based on input from advisors, the company changed its focus from a B2B site to a B2C dating site with a unique... View Details

We outline a dividend signaling model that features investors who are averse to dividend cuts. Managers with strong unobservable cash earnings separate by paying high dividends but retain enough to be likely not to fall short next period. The model is consistent with a... View Details

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by nonprime loans played a central role in the recent financial crisis. Little is known, however, about the underlying forces that drove investor demand for these... View Details

It is January 2014 and Rahul Sharma, cofounder of Micromax Informatics (Micromax), the largest Indian mobile handset company, is preparing for an emergency conference call with his private equity investors. In the last six years, Micromax had grown its annual product... View Details

We show that media coverage of mutual fund holdings affects how investors allocate money across funds. Controlling for fund performance, fund holdings with high past returns attract extra flows only if these stocks were recently featured in major newspapers. In... View Details

The funded search model is one alternative for individuals who, at some point in their career, want to run their own companies. This note looks at the funded search, as a means to entrepreneurship through acquisition and describes the path to buy and run a business... View Details

This case examines Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)'s decision to enter the retirement market with their new "Dimensional Managed DC" product, a complete retirement solution that aimed to provide investors with what they really wanted: the same standard of living in... View Details

Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency... View Details

To determine the extent to which corporate and investor behavior is changing to contribute to a more sustainable society, researchers Robert Eccles and George Serafeim analyzed data involving over 2,000 companies in 23 countries. One result: a ranking of countries... View Details

This conceptual note describes a series of cases on the investor demand approach to investment strategy and management. The cases demonstrate how and why securities market dislocations are driven by non-fundamental demand. I use the cases to progressively build a... View Details

This paper investigates how dividend taxes influence portfolio choices, using the response to the distinctive treatment of a subset of foreign dividends in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) of 2003. An open-economy after-tax capital asset... View Details

We use an experiment to estimate the effect of the SEC's Summary Prospectus, which simplifies mutual fund disclosure. Our subjects chose an equity portfolio and a bond portfolio. Subjects received either statutory prospectuses or Summary Prospectuses. We find no... View Details

We develop an analytical solution to the dynamic portfolio choice problem of an investor with power utility defined over wealth at a finite horizon, who faces a time-varying investment opportunity set, parameterized using a flexible vector autoregression. We apply this... View Details

Brett Barakett, CEO and founder of Tremblant Capital Group, a New York-based hedge fund, must decide what to do with his fund's position in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which has dropped in value by more than 40 percent in recent months. Tremblant is a hedge fund... View Details

Brett Barakett, CEO and founder of Tremblant Capital Group, a New York–based hedge fund, must decide what to do with his fund's position in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which has dropped in value by more than 40% in recent months. Tremblant is a hedge fund that... View Details

Much of empirical corporate finance focuses on sources of the demand for various forms of capital, not the supply. Recently, this has changed. Supply effects of equity and credit markets can arise from a combination of three ingredients: investor tastes, limited... View Details