We document that the rise of factors such as software, intellectual property, brand, and innovative business processes, collectively known as “intangible capital” can explain much of the weakness in physical capital investment since 2000. Moreover, intangibles have distinct economic features...

This paper studies a simple static model in which a firm simultaneously chooses investment and debt composition, when debt can be issued to a financial intermediary (banks) or on public debt markets. The key distinction between the two is that, when liquidation looms, intermediated debt is...

The composition of corporate borrowing between bank loans and market debt varies substantially, both across countries and over the business cycle. This paper develops a new model of firm dynamics, where firms choose both the scale and composition of their borrowing, in order to understand the...

In recent years, US investment has been lackluster, despite rising valuations. Key explanations include growing rents and growing intangibles. We propose and estimate a framework to quantify their roles. The gap between valuations -- reflected in average Q -- and investment -- reflected in...

In recent years, measured TFP growth in the US has declined. We argue that two forces contributed to this decline: the mismeasurement of intangible capital, and rising markups. Markups affect input shares, while intangibles omitted from measures of investment affect measured capital growth, each...

There is widespread disagreement on the quantitative contribution of news shocks to business- cycle fluctuations. This paper provides a simple identifying restriction, based on inventory dynamics, that tightly pins down the contribution of news shocks to business-cycle volatility. We show that...

Interventions in corporate credit markets were a major innovation in the policy response to the 2020 recession. This paper develops and estimates a model to quantify their impact on borrowing and investment. Even during downturns, credit interventions can be a bad policy idea, because they...