Corporate profits are volatile and highly procyclical in the aggregate, but there is substantial heterogeneity across firms in the extent of this procyclicality: I document that firms with lower productivity or higher book-to-market have more procyclical profits. A simple static profit...

Firms spend significant resources on creating and maintaining long-term customer relationships. We explore the role of this customer capital - a form of intangible capital - for firm valuation and physical investment. We build a general equilibrium model of long-term customer relationships,...

To construct a business cycle model consistent with the observed behavior of asset prices, and study the effect of shocks to aggregate uncertainty, I introduce a small, time-varying risk of economic disaster in a standard real business cycle model. The paper establishes two simple theoretical...

How costly will rising temperature due to climate change be for the U.S. economy? Recent research has used the well-identified response of output to weather to estimate this cost. But agents may adapt to the new climate. We propose a methodology to infer adaptation technology from the...

Using an annual panel of U.S. states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real gross domestic product, productivity and...

Credit booms sometimes lead to financial crises which are accompanied with severe and persistent economic slumps. Does this imply that monetary policy should “lean against the wind” and counteract excess credit growth, even at the cost of higher output and inflation volatility? We study this...