We study how leverage determines firm-level responses to monetary policy. Using both high-frequency financial market and quarterly investment data, we find that the role of leverage in monetary transmission changed around the financial crisis of 2007-09. Firms with high leverage were less...

We show that firms which face higher uncertainty adjust their investment less in response to monetary policy shocks. We find corroborating evidence of this differential effect from firm-level stock returns on FOMC announcement days. Our results are explained by a real options or...

Uncertainty at the firm-level falls on FOMC announcement days with substantial variation both across firms and over time. We find that this movement is not related to surprises about the expected path of the policy rate but rather to forward guidance driven changes in uncertainty around the...

This paper studies the impact of geographic banking restrictions on monetary policy transmission. Exploiting the staggered deregulation of U.S. banking from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, we find that interstate deregulation signifi cantly increased the responsiveness of bank lending to...

We study the response of stock prices to monetary policy, distinguishing effects of exogenous shocks from "Delphic" shocks that reveal the Federal Reserve's macroeconomic forecasts. To decompose monetary policy surprises into these separate components we construct a measure of Federal Reserve...

We study the impact of the concentration and complexity of the banking sector on firms' financing and investment behavior over the business cycle. We find that, after the late 1990s, while debt issuance remained procyclical for US firms of all sizes, equity issuance and liquidity accumulation...