This paper explores the impacts of sovereign rating changes on domestic firm investments. Utilising a large sample of 1,589 rated firms in 40 countries during the period of 1995 to 2021, we document significant impacts of sovereign rating events on firm investments, proxied by total, short- and...

Cash holdings as a proportion of total assets of North American corporations have roughly doubled between 1971 and 2006. Prior research attributes the large cash increase to a rise in firms' cash flow volatility. We investigate two mechanisms by which increased volatility can lead to higher cash...

Q-theory predicts that investment frictions steepen the relation between expected returns and firm investment. Using financing constraints to proxy for investment frictions, we document only weak evidence that the investment-to-assets and asset growth effects in the cross-section of returns are...

We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor...

Does policy uncertainty affect productivity? Policy uncertainty creates delays as firms await new information about prices, costs and other market conditions before committing resources. Such delays can have real consequences on firms’ productivity and corporate decisions. First, we find that...

An investment factor, long in low investment stocks and short in high investment stocks, helps explain the new issues puzzle. Adding this factor into standard factor regressions reduces substantially the magnitude of the underperformance following equity and debt offerings and the composite...

This paper explores data and methods to assess the alignment or misalignment with climate mitigation objectives of investments in the construction and refurbishment of residential and non-residential buildings. It takes the United Kingdom (UK) as a case study, where such investments reached GBP...

We show that the behavior of entrepreneurs facing incomplete financial markets and risky investment can explain why accelerations of productivity growth in developing countries tend to be associated with current account improvements. Under uninsurable investment risk, entrepreneurs have to...

Emerging market firms frequently borrow in foreign currency (FX), but their assets are often denominated in domestic currency. This behavior leads to an FX mismatch on firms balance sheets, which can harm their net worth in the event of a depreciation. I use a large, unanticipated, and exogenous...