Despite the clear success of forecast combination in many economic environments, several important issues remain incompletely resolved. The issues relate to selection of the set of forecasts to combine, and whether some form of additional regularization (e.g., shrinkage) is desirable. Against...

When a k period future return is regressed on a current variable such as the log dividend yield, the marginal significance level of the t-test that the return is unpredictable typically increases over some range of future return horizons, k. Local asymptotic power analysis shows that the power...

When a rate of return is regressed on a lagged stochastic regressor, such as a dividend yield, the regression disturbance is correlated with the regressor's innovation. The OLS estimator's finite-sample properties, derived here, can depart substantially from the standard regression setting....

We consider various MIDAS (Mixed Data Sampling) regression models to predict volatility. The models differ in the specification of regressors (squared returns, absolute returns, realized volatility, realized power, and return ranges), in the use of daily or intra-daily (5-minute) data, and in...

We examine quantitatively the extent to which financial distress in the 1990s affected employment behavior in Japan. Based on the firm-level panel data that include small firms, we estimate dynamic labor demand function, taking the impact of financial distress on employment into consideration....

We estimate the impact of COVID-19 on business failures for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using firm-level data in seventeen countries. Absent government support, the failure rate of SMEs would have increased by 9.1 percentage points, representing 4.6 percent of private sector...

The frequency with which firms adjust output prices helps explain persistent differences in capital structure across firms. Unconditionally, the most flexible-price firms have a 19% higher long-term leverage ratio than the most sticky-price firms, controlling for known determinants of capital...

When a nation can finance its investments via foreign-currency denominated debt or domestic-currency claims, what is the optimal capital structure of the nation? Building on the functions of fiat money as both medium of exchange, and store of value like corporate equity, our model connects...

This paper documents a set of new stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility for emerging market firms following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators during the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate financial roots provide a...