The empirical difficulties associated with estimating the effects of changes in interest rates and corporate tax policy on business fixed investment are often blamed on a lack of identification. In this paper, we study the effect of variation in interest rates on investment spending, employing a...

We construct an empirical measure of market frictions in the corporate market based on the difference between the corporate bond spread and the credit default swap spread for a large number of firms in a new, large dataset that we construct. Under fairly standard assumptions, the two spreads...