I study the cross sectional variation of stock returns and technological progress using a dynamic equilibrium model with production. In the model, technological progress is endogenously driven by R&D investment and is composed of two parts. One part is product innovation devoted to creating new...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

We propose a simple methodology to evaluate a large number of potential explanations for the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and subsequent stock returns (the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle). We find that surprisingly many existing explanations explain less than 10% of the...

Previous studies show that firms with low inventory growth outperform firms with high inventory growth in the cross-section of publicly traded firms. In addition, inventory investment is volatile and procyclical, and inventory-to-sales is persistent and countercyclical. We embed an inventory...

Financially-constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. The average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged transactions, and for...

We show that heterogeneity in the composition of the labor force affects asset prices in financial markets in important ways. Theoretically, we combine a standard model of labor heterogeneity (Acemoglu, 2002) with a standard neoclassical q-theory model with labor adjustment costs. We then show...