The widespread emergence of intangible technologies in recent decades may have significantly hurt output growth -- even when these technologies replaced considerably less productive tangible technologies -- because of structurally low interest rates caused by demographic forces. This insight is...

We use exchange-traded options to identify risks relevant to capital structure adjustments in firms. These forward-looking market-based risk measures provide significant explanatory power in predicting net leverage changes in excess of accounting data. They matter most during contractionary...