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...

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

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...

We study the role of brand capital - a primary form of intangible capital - for firm valuation and risk in the cross-section of publicly traded firms. Using a novel empirical measure of brand capital stock constructed from firm level advertising expenditures data, we estimate that the value of...

The ability of corporations to raise external equity finance varies with macroeconomic conditions, suggesting that the cost of equity issuance is time-varying. Using cross sectional data on U.S. publicly traded firms, we construct an empirical proxy of an aggregate shock to the cost of equity...

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...