We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

Using a semi-supervised topic model on 7,000,000 New York Times articles spanning 160 years, we test whether topics of media discourse predict future stock and bond market returns to test rational and behavioral hypotheses about market valuation of disaster risk. Focusing on media discourse...

We characterize how risk evolves during a crisis. Using high-frequency data, we find that the first two principal components (PCs) of the covariance matrix of global asset returns experience large, sudden, and temporary spikes coinciding with well-known crises - Covid-19 pandemic, Global...

In most countries, suppliers of intermediate goods and services are also the main providers of short-term financing to firms. This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of these financial links. In our model, trade credit is the outcome of a long-term contract between firms linked in the...

Existing macroeconomic models focused on bank balance sheet lending are deficient because they do not account for the modern industrial organization of financial intermediation. Utilizing publicly available micro-level lending data, we investigate two increasingly significant margins of...

The amount of information produced about firms' productivities and about the quality of collateral backing their loans varies over time. These information dynamics determine the evolution of credit, output and productivity, which feeds back into incentives to produce information. We characterize...

Do periods of persistently loose monetary policy increase financial fragility and the likelihood of a financial crisis? This is a central question for policymakers, yet the literature does not provide systematic empirical evidence about this link at the aggregate level. In this paper we fill...

Over the past two decades, banks have increasingly focused on offering contingent credit in the form of credit lines as a primary means of corporate borrowing. We review the existing body of research regarding the rationales for banks' provision of liquidity insurance in the form of credit...

Psychologists have found that the age at which successful practitioners typically do their best work varies across professions, but they have not considered whether these peak ages change over time, as economic models suggest they might. Using auction records, we estimate the relationship...

We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We thus generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods based on the difference between imports recorded in United...