In order to identify the relevant sources of firms' financing constraints, we ask what financial frictions matter for corporate policies. To that end, we build, solve, and estimate a range of dynamic models of corporate investment and financing, embedding a host of financial frictions. We focus...

This paper empirically analyses the effect of foreign block acquisitions on the U.S. target firms' credit risk as captured by their CDS. The involvement of foreign investors leads to a significant increase in the target firms' CDS spreads. This effect is stronger when foreign owners are...

We provide a model-free framework to study the global factor structure of exchange rates. To this end, we propose a new methodology to estimate international stochastic discount factors (SDFs) that jointly price cross-sections of international assets, such as stocks, bonds, and currencies, in...

The interplay between investors' demand and providers' incentives has shaped the evolution of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). While early ETFs offered diversification at low cost, later ETFs track niche portfolios and charge high fees. Strikingly, over their first five years, specialized ETFs lose...

We analyze a dynamic model of informed trading where a shareholder accumulates shares in an anonymous market and then expends costly effort to change the firm value. We find that equilibrium prices are affected by the position accumulated by the shareholder, because the level of effort...

We study a dynamic contracting problem in which size is relevant. The agent may take on excessive risk to enhance short-term gains, which exposes the principal to large, infrequent losses. To preserve incentive compatibility, the optimal contract uses size as an instrument; there is downsizing...

We propose a dynamic asset-market equilibrium model in which (1) an "innovative" asset with as-yet-unknown average payoff is traded, and (2) investors delegate investment to experts. Experts secretly renege on investors' orders and take on leveraged positions in the asset to manipulate...

Using all loans granted to firms recorded in the Italian credit register, we estimate correlations between risk-transfer and default probabilities to gauge the severity of informational asymmetries in the loan securitization market. First, the analysis confirms the presence of information...

We study optimal securitization of defaultable assets in a continuous time setting. A financial intermediary can create a portfolio of defaultable assets and then sell it to outside investors. The default risk of the assets in the portfolio is determined by the unobservable costly effort exerted...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...