Government guarantees of private debt deplete equity. The depletion is greatest during periods when the probability of a guarantee payoff is highest. In a setting otherwise subject to Modigliani-Miller neutrality, firms issue guaranteed debt up to the limit the government permits. Declines in...

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g., unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor insurance mechanisms....

To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as "do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?" A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different...

This paper was prepared for a session of the 2009 American Economic Association meeting devoted to examining the views of American economists about the euro and the European Economic and Monetary Union on the tenth anniversary of the euro. I had written an article in 1992 in the Economist and...

Financial crises are particularly severe and lengthy when banks fail to recapitalize after bearing large losses. We present a model that explains the slow recovery of bank capital and economic activity. Banks provide intermediation in markets with information asymmetries. Large equity losses...

Whereas Poterba and Summers (1995) find that firms use hurdle rates that are unrelated to their CAPM betas, Graham and Harvey (2001) find that 74% of their survey firms use the CAPM for capital budgeting. We provide an explanation for these two apparently contradictory conclusions. We find that...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the financial structure of large buyouts. We collect detailed information on the financing of 1157 worldwide private equity deals from 1980 to 2008. Buyout leverage is cross-sectionally unrelated to the leverage of matched public firms, and is largely...

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer-employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. In less developed local credit markets firms can offer a flatter wage-tenure profile than firms in more developed credit...

We develop a stylized model that captures the phenomena of decoupling and recoupling in an environment where heterogeneous entrepreneurial sectors face financial constraints in their relationship with a common set of lenders. In response to adverse shocks, a financially constrained sector must...