The Brexit vote precipitated the unravelling of the UK’s membership of the world’s deepest economic integration agreement. This paper reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Brexit referendum changed expectations about future UK-EU relations. Studying its...

We use a narrative method to construct an uncertainty measure based on transnational geopolitical tensions that is plausibly uncorrelated with the existing economic conditions. Increases in geopolitical uncertainty cause a significant reduction in R&D expenditure and patenting activity –...

The interaction of capital and risk for trading and treasury units is of primary interest in the corporate governance of banks as it links operational profitability and strategic risk management. During the financial crisis, several banks' trading units suffered significantly higher losses than...

This paper investigates how firms manage their cash savings, financing, and investment when aggregate uncertainty is time-varying. I develop and estimate a dynamic model featuring aggregate uncertainty shocks, costly external financing, investment irreversibility, and time-varying risk premia....

We propose a text-based method for measuring and analyzing the international propagation of uncertainty shocks at the firm level. We apply this method to estimate the impact of Brexit-related uncertainty and find widespread reverberations on listed firms in 81 countries. International firms most...

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...

We propose and test a theory of corporate liquidity management in which credit lines provided by banks to firms are a form of monitored liquidity insurance. Bank monitoring and resulting credit line revocations help control illiquidity-seeking behavior by firms. Firms with high liquidity risk...

This paper studies the effects of changes in uncertainty on optimal leverage and investment in a dynamic firm-financing model in which firms have access to complete markets subject to collateral constraints. Entrepreneurs finance projects with their net worth and by issuing state-contingent...

Leasing is one of the most important sources of external finance to corporate firms. This paper develops a dynamic model to investigate the role of uncertainty and financial constraint in understanding the leasing decisions of corporate firms. The model predicts that firms with high uncertainty...

We propose and test a theory of corporate liquidity management in which credit lines provided by banks to firms are a form of monitored liquidity insurance. Bank monitoring and resulting credit line revocations help control illiquidity-seeking behavior by firms. Firms with high liquidity risk...