The cost of capital plays an important role in the allocation of resources among competing uses in a decentralized market system. The purpose of this paper is to organize and present what is known and what is hypothesized about the effects of taxation on the incentive to invest, via the cost of...

Publicly-traded debt securities differ on a number of dimensions, including quality, maturity, seniority, security, and convertibility. Finance research has provided a number of theories as to why firms should issue debt with different features; yet, there is very little empirical work testing...

Firms face uncertain financing conditions and are exposed to the risk of a sudden rise in financing costs during financial crises. We develop a tractable model of dynamic corporate financial management (cash accumulation, investment, equity issuance, risk management, and payout policies) for a...

We show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported their parents through internal lending, became financially constrained...

This paper investigates the 2013 three-fold increase in the French dividend tax rate. Using administrative data covering the universe of firms from 2008-2017 and a quasi-experimental setting, we find that firms swiftly cut dividend payments and used this tax-induced increase in liquidity to...

Using 14,800 forecasts of one-year S&P 500 returns made by Chief Financial Officers over a 12-year period, we track the individual executives who provide multiple forecasts to study how their beliefs evolve dynamically. While CFOs' return forecasts are systematically unbiased, their confidence...

We review the literature on return and cash flow growth predictability form the perspective of the present-value identity. We focus predominantly on recent work. Our emphasis is on U.S. aggregate stock return predictability, but we also discuss evidence from other asset classes and countries

We show that measurable managerial characteristics have significant explanatory power for corporate financing decisions beyond traditional capital-structure determinants. First, managers who believe that their firm is undervalued view external financing as overpriced, especially equity. Such...

In this paper, we use data from developing countries to argue that sovereign defaults are often caused by fiscal pressures generated by large-scale domestic defaults. We argue that these systemic domestic defaults are caused by shocks best interpreted as being non-fundamental. We construct a...

Miscalibration is a standard measure of overconfidence in both psychology and economics. Although it is often used in lab experiments, there is scarcity of evidence about its effects in practice. We test whether top corporate executives are miscalibrated, and whether their miscalibration impacts...