Abstract. By considering a broad class of securities offerings that we term capital structurings, a firm can always avoid pooling with firms whose prospects are poorer. This result implies that firms need not indulge in costly information gathering, hoping thereafter to signal to investors. One application allows us to describe a new theory of capital structurings, in which firms choose their capital structure not (as in traditional capital structure signaling theory) to signal privately known prospects, but rather to signal that no (productively useless) investigation of prospects has been pursued. A second application addresses the issue of the impossibility of informationally efficient capital markets: firms are capable of establishing conditions under which investors will recognize informational efficiency.
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