Using an annual panel of US states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real GDP, productivity, and population. This...

Motor vehicle dealerships in the United States tend to hold inventories equivalent to around 65 days' worth of sales, a relatively high level that has been nearly unchanged for 50 years. Despite playing a prominent role in the volatility of U.S. business cycles, very little is known about why...

This paper uses a dataset of more than 900,000 news stories to test whether news can predict stock returns. We measure sentiment with a proprietary Thomson-Reuters neural network. We find that daily news predicts stock returns for only 1 to 2 days, confirming previous research. Weekly news,...

This paper studies the interaction between monetary policy, financial markets, and the real economy. We develop a Bayesian framework to estimate proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) in which monetary policy shocks are identified by exploiting the information contained in high...

The existing literature implicitly or explicitly assumes that securities lenders primarily respond to demand from borrowers and reinvest their cash collateral through short-term markets. Using a new dataset that matches every U.S. life insurer's bond portfolio, as well as their lending and...

There is much variation in the physical requirements across occupations, giving rise to great differences in later-life productivity, disability risk, and the value of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In this paper, I look at how such differences across occupations affect initial...

This paper shows that funding liquidity risk is priced in the cross-section of excess returns on agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). We derive a measure of funding liquidity risk from dollar-roll implied financing rates (IFRs), which reflect security-level costs of financing positions in...

Partial and reverse retirement are two key behaviors characterizing labor force dynamics for individuals at older ages, with half working part-time and over a third leaving and later re-entering the labor force. The high rate of exit and re-entry is especially surprising given the declining wage...