The use of equity-based compensation for employees in the lower ranks of large organizations is a puzzle for standard economic theory: undiversified employees should discount company equity heavily, and any positive incentive effects should be diminished by free rider problems. We analyze...

How do liquidation values affect financial contract renegotiation? While the amp;apos;incomplete contractingamp;apos; theory of financial contracting predicts that liquidation values determine the allocation of bargaining power between creditors and debtors, there is little empirical evidence on...

This paper identifies a new channel through which bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on non-bankrupt peers. The bankruptcy and liquidation of a retail chain weakens the economies of agglomeration in any given local area, reducing the attractiveness of retail centers for remaining...

Financial market imperfections can have significant impact on employment decisions of firms. We illustrate the economic importance of this channel by showing that employment decisions are constrained by firms' financial health and liquidity. Our main analysis uses a collage of three...

This paper tests financial accelerator models. Using a novel dataset on agricultural production, we examine how exogenous productivity shocks arising from variation in temperature are propagated into the future. We find that past weather shocks have persistent effects on land values and...

We analyze the effect of local-level labor market concentration on wages. Using Census data over the period 1977–2009, we find that: (1) local-level employer concentration exhibits substantial cross-sectional and time-series variation and increases over time; (2) consistent with labor market...

This paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on workers with different levels of labor force attachment. Exploiting variation in labor market tightness across metropolitan areas, we show that the employment of populations with lower labor force attachment--Blacks, high school...

Yes, it did. We use exogenous variation in banks' incentives to conform to the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) around regulatory exam dates to trace out the effect of the CRA on lending activity. Our empirical strategy compares lending behavior of banks undergoing CRA exams...

This paper studies the limitations of the ‘credit channel' in transmitting monetary policy into real economic outcomes. We focus on one particular failure of the credit channel in which although the central bank is infusing money into the banking system, liquidity remains stuck in banks and is...

We analyze how firms strategically renegotiate labor contracts to extract concessions from labor. While anecdotal evidence suggests that firms tend to renegotiate down wages in times of financial distress, there is no empirical evidence that documents such renegotiation, its determinants, and...