Firms seem to care a lot about "risk management": the practice of hedging risks whether they are correlated with market risk or not. The standard reasons why widely held corporations might be averse to idiosyncratic risk are based on the principal-agent problem, bankruptcy costs, external...

We develop a theory linking "misallocation," i.e., dispersion in marginal products of capital (MPK), to macroeconomic risk. Dispersion in MPK depends on (i) heterogeneity in firm-level risk premia and (ii) the price of risk, and thus is countercyclical. We document strong empirical support for...

We show how real and financial frictions amplify, prolong and propagate the impact of uncertainty shocks. We first use a novel instrumentation strategy to address endogeneity in estimating the impact of uncertainty, by exploiting differential firm exposure to exchange rate, policy, treasury, and...

We use novel data on firm-level attention to characterize firms’ exposures to uncertainty. Our data captures a daily cross-section of firm-employee reading across thousands of topics. We use natural language processing tools to assess the types of topics firms are reading and show that firms...

This paper argues that the capacity of financial markets to aggregate dispersed information about economic conditions is diminished in times of distress, resulting in countercyclical uncertainty. Building on a rational expectations equilibrium dynamic environment, I model informed traders as...

This paper provides new evidence about the link between firm level total factor productivity (TFP) and stock returns. We estimate firm level TFP and show that it is strongly related to several firm characteristics such as size, the book to market ratio, investment, and hiring rate. Low...

Intangible capital has arguably become an important component of corporate value. However, it is still an open question whether uncertainty associated with investment in intangible capital is higher or lower than physical capital. We estimate the value of intangible capital in a dynamic...

Thinly traded securities exist in both emerging and well developed markets. However, plausible estimations of market risk measures for portfolios with infrequently traded securities have not been explored in the literature. We propose a methodology to calculate market risk measures based on the...

Thinly traded securities exist in both emerging and well developed markets. However, plausible estimations of market risk measures for portfolios with infrequently traded securities have not been explored in the literature. We propose a methodology to calculate market risk measures based on the...

We find strong empirical support for the risk-shifting mechanism to account for the puzzling negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and future stock returns. First, equity holders take on investments with high idiosyncratic risk when their firms are in distress and receive less...