New business creation declined an unprecedented amount during the Great Recession. I argue that financial constraints led to a contraction in young, small firms, which contributed greatly to the slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data of the universe of firms and a...

We incorporate joint learning about state and parameter into a consumption-based asset pricing model with rare disasters. Agents are uncertain whether a negative shock signals the onset of a disaster or how much long-term damage a disaster will cause and they update their beliefs over time. The...

The 2007-2009 recession is characterized by: a large drop in employment, an unprecedented decline in firm entry, and a slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data, I show that financial constraints reduced employment growth in small relative to large firms by 4.8 to 10.5 percentage points....

In this paper, we examine how learning about disaster risk affects asset pricing in an endowment economy. We extend the literature on rare disasters by allowing for two sources of uncertainty: (1) the lack of historical data results in unknown parameters for the disaster process, and (2) the...

The collapse of international trade surrounding the Great Recession has garnered significant attention. This paper studies firm entry and exit in foreign markets and their role in the post-recession recovery of U.S. exports using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau. We find that...

While the large collapse in aggregate international trade volumes during the Great Recession has been widely studied in the literature, the recovery is much less well understood. Indeed, by 2014 U.S. foreign sales were still below their historical post-recession level. In this note, we summarize...