We observe significant heterogeneity in the correlation between changes in house prices and the growth of small firms across certain countries in Europe. We find that, overall, the correlation is far greater in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. Using a simple model, we show that this...

Although small firms are particularly sensitive to interest rates and other external shocks, empirical work on corporate risk management has focused instead on large public companies. This paper studies fixed-rate and adjustable-rate loans to see how small firms manage their exposure to interest...

A large fraction of the companies that went private between 1990 and 2007 were fairly young public firms, often with the same management team making the crucial restructuring decisions both at the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and the buyout. Why did these public firms decide to...

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the firm's assets. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...

The financial crisis provides a natural experiment for testing theoretical predictions of the equity underwriter's role following an initial public offering. Clients of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia saw their stock prices fall almost 5 percent, on average, on the day...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: "normal times", periods of modest investment, and "booms", periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the...

Dealers, who strategically supply liquidity to traders, are subject to both liquidity and adverse selection costs. While liquidity costs can be mitigated through inter-dealer trading, individual dealers' private motives to acquire information compromise inter-dealer market liquidity. Post-trade...

This paper measures how the 2007-09 financial crisis affected the U.S. federal funds market. I accomplish this by developing and estimating a structural model of this market, in which intermediation plays a crucial role and borrowing banks differ in their unobserved probability of default. The...

We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model that distinguishes supervision from regulation and a novel dataset on work hours of Federal Reserve supervisors. We highlight the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of supervision and use the model to interpret the relationship...

Self-fulfilling expectations are commonly believed to play an important role in the transmission of currency crises across countries. However, existing models that use multiple equilibria to illustrate the importance of such expectations have many undesirable features. This paper presents a new...