What makes a good leader? A good leader is able to coordinate his followers around a credible mission statement, which communicates the future course of action of the organization. In practice, leaders learn about the best course of action for the organization over time. While learning helps...

The changing nature of the corporation forces us to re-examine much of what we take for granted in corporate governance. What precisely is the entity that is being governed? How does the governance system obtain power over it, and what determines the division of power between various...

In this paper, we analyze the transition dynamics associated with an economy's response to trade liberalization. We start by reviewing the recent literature that incorporates firm dynamics into models of international trade. We then build upon that literature to characterize the role of firm...

This paper examines why credit constraints for domestic and exporting firms arise in a setting where banks do not observe firms' productivities. To maintain incentive-compatibility, banks lend below the amount needed for first-best production. The longer time needed for export shipments induces...

Are fluctuations in firms' profitability risk a major cause of regular business cycles? We study this question within the framework of a heterogeneous-firm dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with fixed capital adjustment costs. In such a model, surprise increases of risk lead to a...

We document a new business cycle fact: the cross-sectional standard deviation of firm-level investment (investment dispersion) is robustly and significantly procyclical. This makes investment dispersion different from the dispersion of productivity and output growth, which is countercyclical....

One of the most important developments in the growth literature of the last decade is the enhanced appreciation of the role that the misallocation of resources plays in helping us understand income differences across countries. Misallocation at the micro level typically reduces total factor...

We outline a dividend signaling approach in which rational managers signal firm strength to investors who are loss averse to reductions in dividends relative to the reference point set by prior dividends. Managers with strong but unobservable cash earnings separate themselves by paying high...