In contrast to bonds, cov-lite loans do not require SEC registration and are not subject to securities laws. We show that this distinction plays an important role in firms' choice between funding through cov-lite loans and bonds and helps understand why the market share of cov-lite loans has...

This paper studies policy in a class of economies in which information about commonly-relevant fundamentals -- such as aggregate productivity and demand conditions -- is dispersed and can not be centralized by the government. In these economies, the decentralized use of information can fail to...

This paper uses three different surveys of economic forecasts to assess both the support for and the properties of informational rigidities faced by agents. Specifically, we track the impulse responses of mean forecast errors and disagreement among agents after exogenous structural shocks. Our...

We develop a simple model to study rules based on instruments vs. targets. A principal faces a better informed but biased agent and relies on joint punishments as incentives. Instrument-based rules condition incentives on the agent's observable action; target-based rules condition incentives on...

This paper studies optimal policy in a business-cycle setting in which firms have a blurry understanding of the state of the economy due to informational or cognitive constraints. The latter are not only the source of nominal rigidity but also an impediment in the coordination of production. The...

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...

Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) were one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the structured finance market, fueling the 2003-2007 boom in syndicated loans and leveraged buyouts. The credit crisis brought CLO issuance to a halt, and as a result the leveraged loan market dried...

We explore the link between liquidity and investment in a an overlapping generation model with a standard asynchronicity between firms' access to and need for cash. Imperfect pledgeability hinders the capacity of capital markets to resolve this asynchronicity, resulting in credit rationing and a...

This paper uses data on actual returns on taxable bonds, tax-exempt bonds, and a small sample of equity mutual funds over the 1962-1998 period to compare two asset location strategies for retirement savers. The first strategy gives priority to holding equities, through equity mutual funds, in a...