This paper evaluates the influence of financial contracting costs on the propensity for public corporations to lease fixed capital. We argue that firms facing high costs of external credit, due either to severe asymmetric information or agency costs can economize on the cost of credit by...

We offer a simple theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of economic shocks and regulatory shifts on the balance sheet of a profit-maximizing bank. The allocation of assets between loans and securities as well as the mix of funding between deposits and capital are both influenced by...

This paper establishes empirically the existence of specialization in private-market corporate lending, adding a new dimension to the public versus private debt distinctions now common in the literature. Comparing a large sample of corporate loans made by banks and finance companies, we find the...

The importance of a firm's balance sheet for determining its investment and employment decisions is the central assumption of macroeconomic models of quot;debt deflationquot; or quot;debt overhang.quot; According to these models, firm investment decisions are influenced not only by the...

Some research has suggested that companies with defined benefit (DB) pensions are sometimes significantly misvalued by the market. This is because the measures of pension cost and pension net liabilities embedded in financial statements, taken at face value, can provide very misleading picture...

In this note, we show that, for predicting recessions, such measures of a "long-term spread"--the spread in yields between a far-off maturity such as 10 years and a shorter maturity such as 1 or 2 years--are statistically dominated by a more economically intuitive alternative, a "near-term...

We apply textual analysis tools to measure the degree of optimism versus pessimism of the text that describes Federal Reserve Board forecasts published in the Greenbook. The resulting measure of Greenbook text sentiment, “Tonality,� is found to be strongly correlated, in the...

We present evidence that binding mortgage processing capacity constraints reduce mortgage originations to borrowers of low to modest credit quality. Mortgage processing capacity constraints typically bind when the demand for mortgage refinancing shifts outward, usually because of lower mortgage...

We use data obtained from a series of Michigan Surveys of Consumer Attitudes to study stock market beliefs and portfolio choices of individual investors. We find that expected returns over the medium- and long-term horizon appear to be extrapolated from past realized returns. The findings also...

Some research has suggested that companies with defined benefit (DB) pensions are sometimes significantly misvalued by the market. This is because the measures of pension cost and pension net liabilities embedded in financial statements, taken at face value, can provide a very misleading picture...