Firms producing differentiated products have high margins and therefore low risk. As a result firms invest more into developing differentiated products when they perceive risk is high. Higher risk also implies higher product skewness towards more differentiated products and therefore higher...

This paper presents a set of benchmark moments for evaluation or estimation of quantitative capital structure models. The moments are directly related to the models being studied: the main features of each models' empirical policy functions. The paper describe a general method for estimating...

We study the impact of labor market frictions on asset prices. In the cross section of US firms, a 10 percentage point increase in the firm’s hiring rate is associated with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in the firm’s annual risk premium. We propose an investment-based model with stochastic...

This paper shows that non-convex costs of financial adjustment are quantitatively relevant for explaining firm dynamics. First, empirically, financial activity is lumpy, more than investment activity. Second, non-convex costs are necessary, in the context of a dynamic investment and financing...

During a large part of its recent history, the Mexican economy has experienced a moderate level of inflation. In this note some arguments are given against maintaining inflation in this range for long periods, not only in the sense that long run costs are large and inevitable, but because the...

We study the impact of labor market frictions on asset prices in the cross section of US publicly traded firms. On average, firms with low hiring rates have higher future stock returns than firms with high hiring rates, a difference of 5.2% per annum. Interpreting a hiring decision as analogous...