We measure the distribution of firms' financial soundness over most of the last century for a broad cross section of firms. We highlight three main findings for this key aggregate state variable. First, the three worst recessions between 1926 and 2012 coincided with sharp deteriorations in the...

Illiquidity measures appear to be related to monthly realized returns but do they impact long-run costs of capital (CoC) for firms? Using U.S. data, we find cross-sectional evidence that, controlling for market capitalization, the Amihud (2002) measure of illiquidity is negatively related to CoC...

This contribution applies the cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model to analyze the long-run behavior and short-run dynamics of stock markets across five developed and three emerging economies. The main objective is to check whether liquidity conditions play an important role in stock...