Our paper reports the following two findings: 1) In monthly data, bond purchases by the Fed raise bond prices and reduce bond yields. The residual bond-supply to traders is not fully predictable, and this supply-risk adds between 10 and 40 basis points to the standard deviation of the real...

We study 114 years of U.S. stock market data and find That there are large cohort effects in stock prices, effects that we label 'organization capital,' That cohort effects grew at a rate of 1.75% per year, That the debt-equity ratio of all vintages declined, That three big technological waves...

Firms that entered the stock market in the 1990s were younger than any earlier cohort since World War I. Surprisingly, however, firms that IPO'd at the close of the 19th century were just as young as the companies that are entering today. We argue here that the electrification-era and the IT-era...

We study private equity in a dynamic general equilibrium model and ask two questions: (i) Why does the investment of venture funds respond more strongly to the business cycle than that of buyout funds? (ii) Why are venture funds returns higher than those of buyout? On (i), venture brings in new...

We argue that takeovers have played a major role in speeding up the diffusion of new technology. The role that they play is similar to that of entry and exit of firms. We focus on and compare two periods: 1890-1930 during which electricity and the internal combustion engine spread through the...