The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

Does the world experience a secular decline in capital productivity? Due to the long-run downward trend in interest rates, some economists do think so. However, this reasoning equates capital productivity with interest, which is a critical assumption. This paper presents a new proxy that can be...

This paper aims to shed light on the medium term effects of banking crises on productivity growth, bringing the 'creative destruction' hypothesis to the data. The analysis is done at both the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, I study the differences in mean productivity growth before...

This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

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...

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...

We document a 5 percentage point decline in the share of global corporate income paid to labor from the mid-1970s to the late 2000s. Increased dividend payments did not absorb all of the resulting increase in profits, and therefore, the supply of corporate savings increased by over 20 percentage...

Using tools from computational linguistics, we construct new measures of the impact of Brexit on listed firms in the United States and around the world; these measures are based on the proportion of discussions in quarterly earnings conference calls on the costs, benefits, and risks associated...

Using a unique dataset of credit line drawdowns and liquidity hedging, we study the relation between credit line usage and corporate investment. In line with theoretical predictions that credit lines aid firms to invest during times of limited credit availability, our findings reveal that the...