Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are both liquidity sources and investment vehicles for market participants. This paper analyzes the risks and returns of liquidity provision (LP) investments in AMMs. In a continuous-time model, we show that LP returns decompose into a beta-like component reflecting market risk exposure, and an alpha-like component reflecting microstructural forces: accrued fees minus losses to arbitrageurs. Applying our decomposition to the Uniswap...

What are the consequences of worker private information for corporate governance? When informed workers are compensated partly in equity, they may leave the firm if they observe low managerial effort, reducing the firm value and the manager’s own compensation. Counterintuitively, granting equity to workers can thus increase managers’ effort incentives, despite crowding out managers’ ownership in the firm. Worker equity also exerts downward pressure on...

Financial derivatives, such as futures, options, and swaps, are not contracts on exogenous states of the world, as in Arrow (1964): their payoffs depend on the endogenous market prices of certain goods. How well do markets for price risk approximate the richer state-contingent contracts analyzed by Arrow? We solve analytically for equilibrium trades, asset prices, and welfare in price-linked derivative contract markets, illustrating the role...

A property tax can be thought of as a capital structure, which divides a stream of rents into components accruing to the homeowner and to the government. Near-term rents mainly accrue to homeowners, and far-term rents mainly accrue to governments. This characterization implies that the value of property tax revenues is very sensitive to interest rates, that governments funded by tax revenues have future-biased incentives...

Cryptocurrency exchange market structure is fragmented, since cryptocurrencies are fungible, but customers cannot move freely across cryptocurrency exchanges. We build a model where exchanges with captive customers are linked by arbitrageurs, showing that ``star-shaped'' equilibria can exist, in which arbitrageurs endogenously coordinate on one exchange as a liquidity hub. The model predicts that large exchanges' listing decisions should influence price dispersion, arbitrage flows, trade volumes,...