Using a large representative sample of individual credit bureau records, we document that personal financial distress increases a married couple’s probability of divorce by 4%-8%. Foreclosures strongly affect marital dissolution, whereas Chapter 13 bankruptcies, which protect debtors from...

Investors increasingly allocate capital outside of public equity markets and through private equity investments. We evaluate capital allocation efficiency in public and private markets by comparing the marginal product of capital in firms that receive equity in each market. Public markets...

We exploit the introduction of a foreclosure moratorium and a debt-discharge process in Greece that mitigate the repossession risk of primary residence mortgages to separate strategic from non-strategic delinquencies. We find that 37\% of delinquencies in our sample are strategic and document...

We show that IPOs have non-trivial positive spillover effects on local labor markets, business environments, consumer spending, real estate, and migration. We mitigate endogeneity concerns about unobserved heterogeneity with restrictive geographic fixed effects coupled with a matching procedure....

I investigate whether restrictive loan covenants disrupt or improve firms' operating performance. Using an instrumental variables approach to address the endogenous relationship between covenant strictness and firms' efficiency, I find that stricter loan covenants lead to an increase in...

We use a network regression approach to study the propagation of financial constraints through production networks. We find that supply-chain partners' constraints i) are roughly 73\% as important as a firm's own constraints for explaining investment levels, ii) propagate primarily upstream, and...

The regulatory framework for financial advisors is fragmented, with multiple state and federal regulators. Although prior empirical literature on financial advisors has largely focused on individuals regulated as brokers under FINRA’s primary authority, we define financial advisors by function...

We use a matching method that constructs synthetic counterfactual states to identify the channels that link bank deregulation to financial integration, and thereby to economic growth. We document a positive, but conditional, effect of financial integration on economic growth. We explore the...

Institutional investors' role in shareholder voting is among the most hotly debated subjects in corporate governance. Some argue that institutions lack adequate incentives to effectively monitor managers; others contend that the largest institutions have developed analytical resources that...

Closing auction volume is steadily increasing on NYSE and Nasdaq, and now represents over 10% of trading volume. The NYSE closing auction design is highly advantageous to NYSE floor brokers, who have near-exclusive access to the auction from 3:50 pm to 4:00 pm. We show that closing auction...