The recent financial crisis in 2007-2008 suggests that financial shocks, the aggregate disturbances that originate directly in the financial sector, can play an important role as a source of business cycle fluctuations. In this paper, we explore the impact of aggregate shocks to the cost of...

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between advertising expenditures, brand capital, and asset returns in the cross-section of U.S. publicly traded firms. Interpreting advertising expenditures as firms' investment in brand capital, we document that: (i) firms with high...

We investigate the impact of labor-force heterogeneity on asset prices in a neoclassical model with labor and capital adjustment costs, and with aggregate productivity and adjustment cost shocks. We document that the negative firms' hiring rate-future stock return relation identified in previous...

Previous studies show that firms with low inventory growth outperform firms with high inventory growth in the cross-section of publicly traded firms. In addition, inventory investment is volatile and procyclical, and inventory-to-sales is persistent and countercyclical. We embed an inventory...

We study the impact of labor market frictions on asset prices. In the cross section of U.S. firms, a 10 percentage points increase in the firm's hiring rate is associated with a 1.5 percentage points decrease in the firm's annual risk premium. We propose an investment-based model with stochastic...

We develop a dynamic model with time variation in external equity financing costs and show that variation in these costs is important for the model to quantitatively capture the joint dynamics of firms' asset prices, real quantities, and financial flows in the U.S. economy. Growth firms and high...