During the financial crisis, corporate borrowing and capital expenditures fall sharply. Most existing research links the two phenomena by arguing that a shock to bank lending (or more generally to the corporate credit supply) caused a reduction in capital expenditures. The economic significance...

With functionally efficient capital markets, we expect capital to flow more to the industries with the best growth opportunities. As a result, these industries should invest more and see their assets grow more relative to industries with the worst growth opportunities. We find that industries...

Most firms deleverage from their historical peak market-leverage (ML) ratios to near-zero ML, while also markedly increasing cash balances to high levels. Among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data, median ML is 0.543 at the peak and 0.026 at the later trough, with...

We examine whether capital flows more to high Tobin's q industries and find that it flows more to high q industries from 1971 until 1996 but not from 1997 to 2014. This change is due to a decrease in the q-sensitivity of equity funding resulting mostly from the increased q-sensitivity of...

High Tobin's q industries receive more funding from capital markets than low Tobin's q industries from 1971 to 1996. Since then, the opposite is true. The key to understanding this shift is that large firms for which q is more a proxy for rents than for investment opportunities have become more...

Although firm financial policies were affected by a credit contraction during the recent financial crisis, the impact of increased uncertainty and decreased growth opportunities was stronger than that of the credit contraction per se. From the start of the financial crisis (third quarter of...

Using medians, U.S. firms do not hold more cash than similar foreign firms, irrespective of whether the foreign firms come from countries with good investor protection or not. With means, they do. The means, in contrast to the medians, are affected by U.S. multinationals. U.S. multinationals...