The rapid growth of deposits in New York City over the three decades following the Civil War is often attributed to the release of pent-up demand for the services that transactions accounts could provide. I advance a complementary explanation that centers on the existence of an increasingly...

Value stocks have higher exposure to innovations in the nominal bond risk premium, which measures the markets' perception of cyclical variation in future output growth, than growth stocks. The ICAPM then predicts a value risk premium provided that good news about future output lowers the...

We evaluate the importance of "Limits to Arbitrage" to explain profitability of momentum strategies. Specifically, when the availability of arbitrage capital is in short supply, momentum cycles last longer, and breaks in momentum cycles are shorter. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings...

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of these states. Without additional assumptions, probabilities and stochastic discounting cannot be separately identified. Ross (2013) introduced a set of assumptions that restrict...

The 2005 split-share reform in China mandated the conversion of nontradable stocks into tradable status. This paper examines the effects of stock markets on corporate outcomes exploiting multiple institutional features of the Chinese conversion program. Using a generalized propensity score...

We estimate the response of stock prices to exogenous monetary policy shocks using a vector-autoregressive model with time-varying parameters. Our evidence points to protracted episodes in which, after a short-run decline, stock prices increase persistently in response to an exogenous tightening...

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...

The nature of the firm and its financing are closely interlinked. To produce significant net present value, an entrepreneur has to transform her enterprise into one that is differentiated from the ordinary. To achieve the control that will allow her to execute this strategy, she needs to have...

This paper employs a novel multi-country dataset of corporate defaults to develop a model of distress risk specific to emerging markets. The data suggest that global financial variables such as US interest rates and shifts in global liquidity and risk aversion have significant predictive power...