Using data on a broad set of European firms, we find a strong positive relationship between the use of external financing and future productivity (TFP) growth within firms. This relationship is robust to various measures of financing and productivity, and strengthens as financing costs increase....

Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households' balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on...

I study the business cycle properties of wage posting models with random search, for which the distributions of employment and wages play a nontrivial role for the equilibrium path. In fact, the main result of this paper is that the distribution of firms is one of the most important elements to...

Hurricane Harvey brought more than four feet of rainfall to the Houston area in August 2017, leading to substantial flooding in many areas. Using regulatory data with detailed information on borrowing terms, we compare the borrowing response to Hurricane Harvey in parts of Houston that were more...

We propose a method to decompose stock returns period by period. First, we argue that one can directly estimate expected stock returns from securities available in modern financial markets (using the real yield curve and the Martin (2017) equity risk premium). Second, we derive a return...

This paper studies competitive market shutdowns due to adverse selection, where sellers post nonexclusive menus of contracts. We first show that the presence of the worst type of agents (moldy lemons) causes markets to fail only if their mass is sufficiently large. We then show that a small mass...

Money market funds (MMFs) are popular around the world, with over $9 trillion in assets under management globally. From their origins in the 1970s, MMFs have operated in a niche between the capital markets and the banking system, as investment funds that offer private money‐like assets with...

This paper explores the factors behind differences in wages between manufacturing and other sectors. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the manufacturing wage premium--the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing...

We study the impact of unanticipated monetary policy news around FOMC announcements on secondary market corporate loan spreads. We find that the reaction of loan spreads to monetary policy news is weaker than that of bond spreads: following an unanticipated monetary policy tightening (easing)...

We provide new evidence on the effect of education on later life health. Using variation in state compulsory schooling laws, we examine education's effect on a range of outcomes encompassing physical health, decision-making, and life expectancy. We employ under-utilized Health and Retirement...