We analyze the impact of bad-tail risks on managerial pay functions, especially the decision to pay managers in stock or in options. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we find that options are often a superior vehicle for limiting managerial incentives to take bad-tail risks while providing...

Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely...

The expansion in financial sector "safe" assets, largely in the form of structured products from the U.S. and the Caribbean, in the lead-up to the global financial crisis has by now been fairly well documented. Using a unique dataset derived from security-level data on U.S. portfolio holdings of...

The main contribution of this paper is to identify the strong predictive power of the relative concentration of depth provision, rather than volume of orders, over volatility. To this end, we propose a new measure, relative liquidity (RLIQ), which extracts information from a limit order book...

This paper studies the effects of a path change in government debt composition and aggregate transfers on allocations and prices. It is shown that the effects are zero under some agent-specific transfer scheme even when markets are incomplete. If markets are complete, then the effects are zero...

American women tend to be less financially literate than men, which is consistent with a household division of labor in which men manage finances. However, women also tend to outlive their husbands, so they will eventually need to take over this task. Using a new survey of older couples, I find...