Why are downturns following episodes of high valuations of firms so severe and long? Why do firms take on high debt when they anticipate high valuations, and underperform subsequently? In this paper, we propose a theory of financing cycles where the control rights to enforce claims in an asset...

Why do firms choose high debt when they anticipate high valuations, and underperform subsequently? We propose a theory of financing cycles where the importance of creditors' control rights over cash flows (“pledgeability”) varies with industry liquidity. The market allows firms take on more...

The cross-sectional average of pairwise correlations across stocks traded on the NYSE, AMEX, and Nasdaq is a powerful predictor of U.S. economic activity at a horizon of one to four years. Its predictive ability is on a par with the slope of the yield curve and significantly exceeds that of some...

We study a canonical model of decentralized exchange for a durable good or asset, where agents are assumed to have time-varying, heterogeneous utility types. Whereas the existing literature has focused on the special case of two types, we allow agents' utility to be drawn from an arbitrary...