We first wrote and circulated our “Rookie's Guide” paper about the academic labor market for newly minted finance PhDs twenty years ago. It passed hand-to-hand and via photocopies of photocopies sent using snail mail (or, back then, we just called it ‘mail'). Since then, much has changed...

There is no consensus in the literature regarding the financial consequences of megamergers in part due to the difficulty in establishing a good counterfactual. By comparing the performance of these deals to the performance of synthetic mergers constructed using a novel matching procedure, we...

We study the influence of credit default swaps (CDS) trading on the costs of bond intermediation. After CDS initiation, CDS firms pay 12-28% (8-20 basis points) lower underwriting fees than similar non-CDS firms do. Underwriting fees decline more for riskier issuers and illiquid bonds for which...

The average maturity of newly issued corporate bonds has declined substantially over the past 40 years, and the traditional determinants of debt maturity fail to explain this decrease fully. We show that the changing composition of the investors in the corporate bond market affects the maturity...

We examine the impact of population aging on municipal access to credit. A one standard deviation increase in a state's population age leads to a 23 basis point increase in municipal bond issue spread. Three mechanisms drive this effect: income tax revenue, healthcare liabilities, and pension...

We provide evidence of discrimination in auto lending. Combining credit bureau records with borrower characteristics, we find that Black and Hispanic applicants' loan approval rates are 1.5 percentage points lower, even controlling for creditworthiness. In aggregate, discrimination crowds out...