We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical data from the Ifo Institute's Business Climate Survey. We find that firms' forecasts improve as they age. We also exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has undergone a revolution. But have market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from current...

Financing constraints are one of the biggest concerns impacting potential entrepreneurs around the world. Given the important role that entrepreneurship is believed to play in the process of economic growth, alleviating financing constraints for would-be entrepreneurs is also an important goal...

How does technological progress in financial intermediation affect the economy? To address this question a costly-state verification framework is embedded into a standard growth model. In particular, financial intermediaries can invest resources to monitor the returns earned by firms. The...

The history of the financing of the American corporation can be described along many dimensions. One dimension of that history that underlies various measures of historical change in corporate finance is the range of feasible relationships between corporations and intermediaries. Intermediaries...

This paper analyzes a class of competitive economies with production, incomplete financial markets, and agency frictions. Firms take their production, financing, and contractual decisions so as to maximize their value under rational conjectures. We show that competitive equilibria exist and that...

We review the recent literature on the financing of innovation, inclusive of large companies and new startups. This research strand has been very active over the past five years, generating important new findings, questioning some long-held beliefs, and creating its own puzzles. Our review...

Financial intermediaries borrow in order to lend. When credit is increasing rapidly, the traditional deposit funding (core liabilities) is supplemented with other funding (non-core liabilities). We explore the hypothesis that monetary aggregates reflect the size of non-core and core liabilities...

This paper investigates the quantitative implications of two business cycle models in which aggregate fluctuations arise in response to variations in the process of financial intermediation. In the first, fundamental shocks in the capital accumulation process lead to fluctuations in the real...