Financial intermediaries issue the majority of liquid securities, and nonfinancial firms have become net savers, holding intermediaries' debt as cash. This paper shows that intermediaries' liquidity creation stimulates growth -- firms hold their debt for unhedgeable investment needs -- but also...

We study the effects of political uncertainty on commodity markets from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, commodity prices and inventories decline by 6.6% and 5.7%, respectively, and convenience yields increase by 1.9% in the quarter...

Most firms deleverage from their historical peak market-leverage (ML) ratios to near-zero ML, while also markedly increasing cash balances to high levels. Among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data, median ML is 0.543 at the peak and 0.026 at the later trough, with...

Over two decades, ETFs have become one of the most popular investment vehicle among retail and professional investors due to their low transaction costs and high liquidity, taking market share from traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds and index futures. Research has shown that in...

Long-short anomaly returns are strongly related to the day of the week. Anomalies for which the speculative leg is the short (long) leg experience the highest (lowest) returns on Monday. The opposite pattern is observed on Fridays. The effects are large; Monday (Friday) alone accounts for over...

We examine the current state of the U.S. public corporation and how it has evolved over the last 40 years. After falling by 50 percent since its peak in 1997, the number of public corporations is now smaller than 40 years ago. These corporations are now much larger and over the last twenty years...

Using quarterly data on IPOs and SEOs in 38 countries over the period 1995-2014, we show that changes in equity issuance are significantly and positively related to lagged changes in aggregate local market liquidity. This relation is at least as economically significant as the well-known...