How do lenders use their reputation when participating in syndicated loans? I address this question by focusing on syndicate composition with respect to participants' reputation and its impact on loan spreads. I find that lender reputation enables it to compete in terms of choosing the types of...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate binds, monetary policy makers may lack traditional tools to stimulate aggregate demand. We investigate whether "unconventional" fiscal policy, in the form of pre-announced consumption tax changes, has the potential to meaningfully shift durables...

Which markets do institutions use to change exposure to credit risk? Using a unique data set of transactions in corporate bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) by large financial institutions, we show that simultaneous transactions in both markets are rare, with an average institution having an...

We provide new evidence that disruptions in firm's access to credit during the recent financial crisis had significant effects on product innovation in the consumer-goods sector. We combine highly granular retail-scan data with lending data from the Community Reinvestment Act and Dealscan and we...

We develop a novel technique to extract credit-relevant information from the text of quarterly earnings calls. This information is not spanned by fundamental or market variables and forecasts future credit spread changes. One reason for such forecastability is that our text-based measure...

This paper focuses on the issue of limited financial market participation and determines a lower bound on the level of fixed transaction costs that are required to reconcile observed portfolio choices with asset returns within an isoelastic utility framework. The bound is determined from the set...

Several explanations for the observed limited stock market participation have been offered in the literature. One of the most promising one is the presence of market frictions mostly in the form of fixed entry and/or transaction costs. Empirical studies strongly point to a significant structural...

This paper considers a sequence of discrete-time random walk markets with a single risky asset, and gives conditions for the existence of arbitrage opportunities or free lunches with vanishing risk, of the form of waiting to buy and selling the next period, with no shorting, and furthermore for...

We consider the problem of portfolio selection within the classical Markowitz meanvariance optimizing framework, which has served as the basis for modern portfolio theory for more than 50 years. Efforts to translate this theoretical foundation into a viable portfolio construction algorithm have...

This paper analyzes the determinants of cross-border asset holdings on cross-country data and a Swedish data set. We focus our analysis on the effect of the euro not only for the determinants of bond holdings, but also of equity and banking assets. With the help of a simple theoretical model, we...