This paper examines the relation between industry competition, credit spreads, and levered equity returns. I build a quantitative model where firms make investment, financing, and default decisions subject to aggregate and idiosyncratic risk. Firms operate in heterogeneous industries that differ...

I show that firms' ability to postpone entry has important implications for our understanding of the observed business cycle behavior of start-ups. I use a model that closely replicates the main features of the US firm dynamics to explore and quantify the mechanism. I find that the option to...

In this article we argue that asymmetric information can explain why seignorage is an inferior choice to debt for governments. We also argue that the Ricardian equivalence for governments is very similar to what the Modigliani-Miller proposition is for corporations. Our model is based on Bolton...

We investigate firms' optimal investment timing and capacity decisions in the presence of time-to-build and competition. Due to the uncertainty in time-to-build, the product of the leader who makes the first investment might enter the market later than that of the follower. We show that a firm...

Using a semiparametric smooth-coefficient partial adjustment model, this study finds evidence for asymmetric peer effects on capital structure adjustment speeds between overlevered and underlevered firms. Overlevered firms' adjustment speeds and peer firm shocks have a U-shaped relationship,...

How do firms finance their investment? To what extent does the financing mix depends on the nature or the size of investment? To what extent does the funding mix of investment vary along firm size? Relying on a unique database of firms covering 72% of the value added in France over three...

This paper studies how biases in managerial beliefs affect managerial decisions, firm performance, and the macroeconomy. Using a new survey of US managers I establish three facts. (1) Managers are not over-optimistic: sales growth forecasts on average do not exceed realizations. (2) Managers are...

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 show that set-up costs are a key determinant of the capital structure of young firms. Theoretically, when firms face high set-up costs, they can only be established by leveraging up and lengthening debt maturity. Empirically, we use a large sample of French firms to show that young firms have...

The paper develops a stand-alone and testable gravity model to explain international patterns of foreign direct investment (FDI). The core model is based on knowledge-based gravitational forces that are directly or indirectly linked to a country's economic mass (GDP). The micro-economic part of...