This paper brings into focus a link between the investment and financing decisions of a firm which has an access to costly debt financing. Our analysis shows that lump-sum debt issuance costs play a prominent role in a determination of the optimal investment strategy. Faced with larger lump-sum...

We use a French firm-level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is...

Are married couples more credit constrained than unmarried households? If the cost of separation increases the risk of default, banks might be willing to lend to stable couples. In presence of incomplete information, marriage could be used as a signal of the quality of the match. This paper...

In this paper, we formalize the view that economic development requires high rates of productive entrepreneurship, and this requires an e¢ cient matching between entrepreneurial talent and production technologies. We …rst explore the role of …nancial development in promoting such e¢ cient...

This paper provides a new approach to analyzing credit constraints by differentiating which of the household's production and consumption decisions are affected by credit constraints. It also provides a first attempt to estimate of the extent and determinants of credit constraints in the...

In this paper, we argue that credit market imperfections impact not only the level of unemployment, but also its persistence. For this purpose, we first develop a theoretical model based on the equilibrium matching framework of Mortensen and Pissarides (1999) and Pissarides (2000) where we...

This paper assesses the long-run optimal level of public debt in a framework where aggregate fluctuations are taken into account. Households are subject to both aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks and the market structure prevents them from perfectly insuring against risk. We find that the...

This article builds a model of financial frictions to explain the aftermath of natural disasters. In constrained economies, after a large shock on capital, affected entrepreneurs might lose access to credit together with their stock of capital. Investment does not flow to high-returns projects....

We construct a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and borrowing constraints, in order to study the term structure of real interest rates. Agents are subject to both aggregate and idiosyncratic income shocks, which latter may force them into early portfolio liquidation whilst in...

This article identifies a new channel through which inflation affects the real economy. In a simple monetary model where agents face heterogenous income flows, it is proven that credit constraints create heterogeneity in money demand. Because of this heterogeneity, long run inflation affects the...