We model leverage cycles in the natural laboratory of a mature asset class, namely US Commercial Real Estate. In this setting we can observe entrepreneurs' asset values as well as debt balances. We model capital-market yields, as conditioned by market-wide leverage, an indicator of debt...

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that...

Early-stage firms utilize venture debt in one-third of financing rounds despite their general lack of cash flow and collateral. In our model, we show how venture debt aligns incentives within a firm. We derive a novel theoretical channel in which runway extension through debt increases firm...

We show there is a much stronger negative dynamic relation between changes in economic uncertainty and Treasury yields over weaker-economic times since at least 1990. We document this economic-state variation in uncertainty-yield dynamics for weekly and monthly change horizons, for nominal...

We investigate the diffusion of tax planning across firms, and the real effects and sharing of benefits from such diffusion. Using supply chain relationships among firms as a possible diffusion channel, we find that tax planning spreads from principal customers to their dependent suppliers. We...

We compare several approaches for generating a prioritized list of products to be counted in a retail store, with the objective of detecting inventory record inaccuracy and unknown out-of-stocks. We consider both "rule-based" approaches, which sort products based on heuristic indices, and...

This paper uses variation in real estate prices to test whether CEOs are paid for luck or to respond to luck. We distinguish between pay for luck and pay for responding to luck by exploiting GAAP accounting rules. In the United States, real estate used in the firm's operations is not...

Recent evidence indicates the value premium declined over time. In this paper, we argue this decline happened because book equity, BE, is no longer a good proxy for fundamental equity, FE, defined as the equity value originating purely from expected cash flows (i.e., no discount rate differences...

Current factor models do not identify risks that matter to investors. To address this issue, we provide a factor model implementation of the ICAPM, which captures market risk and intertemporal risk (i.e., changes in long-term expected returns and volatility). We build our intertemporal risk...

Despite extensive empirical evidence of the economic and financial benefits of green buildings, energy retrofit investments in existing buildings have not reached widespread adoption.This paper empirically estimate returns to energy retrofit investments for multifamily and commercial buildings...