We study the effect of legal risk on firms' investment. Using legal risk measures based on the number of litigious words in SEC 10-K filings, we find legal risk reduces investment. Underlying mechanisms include both i) a financing channel, whereby legal risk reduces credit ratings, increases...

Intangible-intensive firms in the U.S. hold an enormous amount of liquid assets that are in fact short-term debts issued by financial intermediaries. This paper builds a macro-finance model that captures this structure. A self-perpetuating savings glut emerges in equilibrium. As intangibles...

We document that localized policies aimed at mitigating climate risk can have unintended consequences due to regulatory arbitrage by firms. Using a difference-in-differences framework to study the impact of the California cap-and-trade program with US plant level data, we show that financially...

How does global warming affect firms' activities? We consider this issue from the perspective of theelectricity producing industry. Warmer temperatures increase the demand for air conditioning, the use of which fluctuates substantially over time, making investments in “flexible” power plants...

Many institutional investors depend on the returns they generate to fund their operations and liabilities. How do these investors' financial conditions affect the management of their portfolios? We address this issue using the insurance industry because insurers are large investors for which...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

The q-factor model shows strong explanatory power and largely summarizes the cross section of average stock returns. In particular, the q-factor model fully subsumes the Fama-French (2018) 6-factor model in head-to-head factor spanning tests. The q-factor model is an empirical implementation of...

An increasing fraction of firms worldwide operate in multiple countries. We study the costs and benefits of being multinational in firms' corporate financial decisions and survey the related academic evidence. We document that, among U.S. publicly traded firms, the prevalence of multinationals...

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...

To study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value, we incorporate a widely-used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q-theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk...