We use new firm-level estimates of the cost of capital and uncertainty to study the drivers of UK business investment in a neoclassical investment model. We construct firm-specific measures of the cost of capital and uncertainty and use new UK survey data to estimate firm-specific investment...

Does corporate debt overhang affect investment over the medium term? To uncover this association, I measure debt overhang with a concept of debt accumulation or debt boom, and combine leverage with liquid assets to capture financial constraints. Using a large US firm-level panel over 1985...

Firms with high pre-crisis cash holdings invested significantly more than their cash-poor rivals during the global financial crisis and especially so during the recovery phase. This resulted in a persistent and growing investment gap between cash-rich and cash-poor firms. Cash especially...

We find that capital renting makes up one fifth of US capital expenditures, and it increases during downturns. Further, we present cross-country evidence that output losses after financial crises are smaller where renting is more prevalent. To understand these findings, we build a general...

This paper develops a DSGE model in which banks use short-term deposits to provide firms with long-term credit. The demand for long-term credit arises because firms borrow in order to finance their capital stock which they only adjust at infrequent intervals. We show within a real business cycle...

Using a structural vector autoregression, we document that a contractionary monetary policy shock triggers a decline in durable and non-durable outputs as well as a contraction in bank equity and a rise in the excess bond premium. The latter points to an important transmission channel of...

Can policymakers improve macroeconomic performance by encouraging the entry of high‑performance start‑ups? To answer this question, we construct a novel and comprehensive data set on 1.3 million start‑ups in 10 European countries. We apply cluster analysis to identify distinct start‑up...

This paper shows that lending relationships insulate corporate investment from fluctuations in collateral values. We construct a novel database covering the banking relationships of private and public UK firms and their individual directors. The sensitivity of corporate investment to changes in...

The Lehman Brothers event in 2008 created a large uncertainty shock that triggered an economic slowdown lasting a decade. The macroeconomic effects are well documented, but the effect on business decisions much less so. In this paper, we explore corporate data to investigate how economic...

The Basel III/CRD IV reforms to the banking system following the financial crisis of 2008–09 required banks to raise significantly both the quality and quantity of capital on their balance sheets. This econometric study provides evidence of both the long and short-term implications for ongoing...