This paper investigates how the exposure of secured lenders to their debtors' environmental liability affects employment, production and pollution. Using a US federal reform as a novel natural experiment, I show that firms increase on-site pollution, cut investment in abatement technology and...

We identify fixed-income mutual funds as an important contributor to the unusually high selling pressure in liquid asset markets during the Covid-19 crisis. We show that mutual fund liquidity transformation led to pronounced investor outflows. In meeting redemptions, funds followed a pecking...

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in continuous time. My generalized framework accommodates jumps and heterogeneous recursive preferences. I show that countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to risk premia if and only if all...

Risk premia are significantly elevated during periods of democratization in a cross-country panel of equity data covering 85 countries over 200 years, despite little evidence of a negative effect on either realized or expected GDP and dividends. This result is explained in an asset pricing model...

U.S. state pensions are underfunded by trillions of dollars, but their economic burden is unclear. In a model of inefficient taxation, real estate fully reflects the cost of these shortfalls when it is the only form of immobile capital. We study the effect of pension shortfalls on real estate...

We model firms' optimal allocation of resources between surplus-creating (a.k.a., productive) activities and surplus-appropriating (a.k.a., rent-seeking) activities. We show that economy- or industry-wide technological progresses, such as the recent improvements in processing big data, induce a...

Decomposing inflation into core and non-core components (e.g., energy) sheds new light on the nature of inflation risk and risk premia. While stocks have insignificant exposure to headline inflation in the U.S., their core inflation betas are negative and energy betas are positive. Conventional...

In this paper, I propose and test a new channel that can affect bank lending in an emerging markets setting. This channel works as follows. When there are covered interest rate parity (CIP) deviations, banks attempt to arbitrage them. This requires banks to borrow in a particular currency. In...

This paper proposes a model that sheds light on the appropriate discount rate on projects that mitigate climate change. In addition, it helps determine the best time to start implementing climate policy. The model is production-based and features endogenous climate-related disasters. It suggests...

We study the performance of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) to understand the market imperfections giving rise to these vehicles and the corresponding costs. CLO equity tranches earn positive abnormal returns from the risk-adjusted price differential between leveraged loans and CLO debt...