We develop a model of investment, financing, and cash management decisions in which investment is lumpy and firms face uncertainty regarding their ability to raise funds in the capital markets. We characterize optimal policies explicitly and show that the smoothpasting conditions used in prior contributions are necessary, but may not be sufficient, for an optimum. Instead of the standard Miller and Orr (1966) double-barrier policy for financing and payout, firms may optimally raise outside funds before exhausting internal resources and the optimal payout policy may feature several regions, with both smooth and discrete dividend payments. In the model, firms with high investment costs are qualitatively as well as quantitatively different in their investment, financing, and payout behaviors from firms with low investment costs. Finally, investment and payout do not always increase with slack, challenging the use of investment-cash flow sensitivities or payout ratios as measures of financing constraints.

Most assets are traded in multiple interconnected trading venues. This paper develops an equilibrium model of decentralized markets that accommodates general market structures with coexisting exchanges. Decentralized markets can allocate risk among traders with different risk preferences more efficiently, thus realizing gains from trade that cannot be reproduced in centralized markets. Market decentralization always increases price impact. Yet, markets in which assets are traded in multiple exchanges, whether they are disjoint or intermediated, can give higher welfare than the centralized market with the same traders and assets. In decentralized markets, demand substitutability across assets is endogenous and heterogeneous among traders. (JEL D43, D44, D85, G11, G12)

We study the existence of equilibria with endogenously complete markets in a continuous-time, heterogenous agents economy driven by a multidimensional diffusion process. Our main results show that if prices are real analytic as functions of time and the state variables of the model then a sufficient condition for market completeness is that the volatility of dividends be nondegenerate. In contrast to previous research, our formulation does not require that securities pay terminal dividends and thus allows for both finite or infinite horizon economies. We illustrate our results by providing easily applicable conditions for market completeness in two benchmark cases: that where the state variables are given by a vector autoregressive process and that where they are given by a vector of autonomous diffusion processes. We also provide counterexamples which show that real analyticity cannot be dispensed with if one is to deduce dynamic market completeness from the structure of dividends.