Using data from SEC filings, I show that the typical bank loan is renegotiated five times, or every nine months. The pricing, maturity, amount, and covenants are all significantly modified during each renegotiation, whose timing is governed by the financial health of the contracting parties and...

China and South Korea both experienced substantial increases in household debt through 2021, and now both countries face a weakening economy. This essay gleans lessons from the "credit-driven household demand channel" (e.g., Mian and Sufi 2018) to explore how the two economies will fare in the...

We study the performance of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) to understand the market imperfections giving rise to these vehicles and their corresponding economic costs. CLO equity tranches earn positive abnormal returns from the risk-adjusted price differential between leveraged loans and...

We show that variation in short-term nominal interest rates produces an endogenous response in the design of and commitment to corporate loan contracts. Interest rates are negatively related to the cash flow rights and positively related to the control rights granted to creditors. An implication...

Using data spanning the 20th century, we show that most accounting-based return anomalies are spurious. When examined out-of-sample by moving either backward or forward in time, anomalies' average returns decrease, and volatilities and correlations with other anomalies increase. The...

Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded nonfinancial firms over the last century, we show that U.S. federal government debt issuance significantly affects corporate financial policies and balance sheets through its impact on investors' portfolio...

Unregulated U.S. corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage - low and stable before 1945 - more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s. The median firm in 1946 had no debt, but by 1970 had...

Do low interest rates contribute to the rise in market concentration? Using data on firm financials and high frequency monetary policy shocks, we find that falling interest rates disproportionately benefit industry leaders, especially when the initial interest rate is already low. Falling rates...

From 2011 to 2014, the Brazilian government conducted a heavily advertised major credit expansion program through government banks as part of its effort to stimulate the economy. Using administrative data on individual-level borrowing and spending, we find that the program led to a substantial...

Financial crises have large deleterious effects on economic activity, and as such have been the focus of a large body of research. This study surveys the existing literature on financial crises, exploring how crises are measured, whether they are predictable, and why they are associated with...