We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor...

How does government borrowing affect corporate financing and investment? This paper focuses on the role that government debt plays in providing a safe and liquid store of value to the private sector. In the data, I show that firms interact with the market for government debt in two ways: first,...

We examine the relationship between real exchange rate fluctuations and firm-level investment and growth using data for a sample of close to 33,000 firms from 68 advanced and emerging market countries over the 2000-2014 period. We show that real depreciations boost profits, investment, and asset...

Financial covenants influence firm behavior by state-contingently allocating decision rights. I develop a quantitative model with long-term debt where shareholders cannot commit to not dilute existing lenders with new debt issuances and risky investments. Lenders intervene upon covenant...

This paper explores the connection between rising intangible capital and the secular upward trend in US corporate cash holdings. We calibrate a dynamic model with two productive assets, tangible and intangible capital, to highlight the following points: 1) since only tangible capital can be...

This paper studies how investor heterogeneity determines equilibrium debt maturity in a model with default. The traditional representative investor assumption is a special case where a weak form of the Modigliani-Miller theorem holds; allocations with either all long- or all short-term debt are...

We study the role of insurance companies in propagating liquidity shocks to the real economy. We use natural disasters as our instrument to identify exogenous shifts in capital market liquidity, and study whether capital market liquidity affects regional-level fiscal conditions and drives GDP...

I provide evidence that covenants in bond indentures affect the firm's investment policy outside of covenant violations. Using a large dataset of public bonds, and controlling for the self-selectivity of covenant inclusion, I find that bonds with investment (financing) restrictions are...

We examine the relation between the financial health of banks and their willingness to supply capital to borrowers under previously committed credit lines. We show that during the collapse of the Asset Backed Commercial Paper market in the last quarter of 2007 and the first half of 2008, banks...

Intangible assets have always been part of the economic landscape. In this study we examine the impact of intangibles, both internally developed and externally acquired, on our ability to identify differences in expected stock returns. Our research does not find compelling evidence that we...