The process of globalization encompasses economic and financial integration. Abolition of capital controls and dismantling of barriers of different kinds are important ingredients of the process that will entirely change the exposure of previously sheltered companies to shocks on the global...

The process of globalization encompasses economic and financial integration. The abolition of capital controls and the dismantling of barriers of different kinds will expose previously sheltered companies to shocks on the global economic arena. Policy-makers in already globalized countries have...

Financial intermediaries issue the majority of liquid securities, and nonfinancial firms have become net savers, holding intermediaries' debt as cash. This paper shows that intermediaries' liquidity creation stimulates growth -- firms hold their debt for unhedgeable investment needs -- but also...

We investigate the circumstances in which business cycle forecasting is beneficial for business by addressing both the short-run and the long-run aspects. For an assessment of short-run forecasting we make a distinction between using publicly available information of cycle probabilities and the...

This paper develops a search and matching model of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and uses it to evaluate the implications of merger activity for aggregate economic outcomes. The theory is consistent with a rich set of micro-level facts on US M&A, including, e.g., sorting among merging firms, a...

We report laboratory experiments investigating the cyclicality of profit-enhancing investment in a competitive environment. In our setting, optimal investment is counter-cyclical when investment costs fall following market downturns. However, we do not observe counter-cyclical investment....

We study the impact of macroeconomic instability on business exit in a world where acquisition and bankruptcy are co-determined. Our objective is to discover how the processes that determine bankruptcies and acquisitions depend on the macroeconomic environment, particularly, macroeconomic...

This paper (i) estimates the local effects of government stimulus spending on labor market outcomes and (ii) shows how these effects can be obtained from a firm's optimal policy in the presence of costs to hiring workers. We analyze the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery...

This paper studies the effect of government stimulus spending on a novel aspect of the labor market: the differential impact of spending on the total wage bill versus employment. We analyze the 2009 Recovery Act via instrumental variables using a new instrument, the spending done by federal...

We analyze output growth risk with respect to financial conditions across U.S. manufacturing industries. Using a multi-level quantile regression approach, we find strong heterogeneity in growth risk, particularly between the more vulnerable durable goods sector and the more resilient nondurable...