We develop a canonical framework to think about credit market frictions and aggregate economic activity in the context of the current crisis. We use the framework to address two issues in particular: first, how disruptions in financial intermediation can induce a crisis that affects real...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: "normal times", periods of modest investment, and "booms", periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if it holds, market valuations must follow a random walk; hence, the hypothesis is frequently criticized on the basis of empirical evidence against such a prediction. Yet this reasoning incurs what we...

Expected returns vary over time along with business cycles. Momentum payoffs are lack of rational explanation. This paper examines how the time-varying expected returns affect each individual firm differently, and hence what the cross-sectional phenomena are. The result shows that the model...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

Using a rich dataset of Colombian manufacturing establishments, we illustrate scarring effects of recessions operating through inefficient exit induced by heterogeneous credit constraints. We show that financially constrained businesses may be forced to exit the market during recessions even if...

This paper suggests that business cycles may be a manifestation of coupled real economy and stock market dynamics and describes a mechanism that can generate economic fluctuations consistent with observed business cycles. To this end, we seek to incorporate into the macroeconomic framework a...

Hou and Moskowitz (2005) use the stock price delay in reflecting market-wide information to measure market frictions each individual firm faces. In this study, to better understand how the price formation process is affected by the business cycle, we examine the relation between changes in the...