We explore how lowering labor market frictions for female workers affects corporate performance. Using the staggered adoption of state-level Paid Family Leave acts, we provide causal evidence on the value created by relieving frictions to accessing female talent, for private and public firms....

The q-factor model shows strong explanatory power and largely summarizes the cross section of average stock returns. In particular, the q-factor model fully subsumes the Fama-French (2018) 6-factor model in head-to-head factor spanning tests. The q-factor model is an empirical implementation of...

I study the empirical importance of debt overhang using a unique dataset on resource extraction firms, which provides ex ante measures of investment opportunities and important variation in the terms of a firm's obligations. In particular, unsecured reclamation liabilities create overhang that...

CEO turnover is highly pro-cyclical. This paper aims to explain why. We begin by showing that the cyclicality is driven almost entirely by executives of retirement age. We further provide evidence that executives time their retirement to maximize the value of their pensions. Since CEO pay is...

We explore the actions of financially distressed banks in two distinct periods that include financial crises (1985-1994, 2005-2014) and differ in bank regulations, especially concerning capital requirements and enforcement. In contrast to the widespread belief that distressed banks gamble for...

This paper documents how traditional and shadow banks interacted with one another during the 2007 financial crisis, when both assets and liabilities flew from shadow to traditional banks. To rationalize their behavior, we propose a simple model which demonstrates the symbiotic coexistence and...

We study the motive of using equity-based pay in executive compensation: the risk-sharing motive versus the performance-measuring motive. The empirical design goes through the relationship between equity-based pay and stock price informativeness (SPI). We find equity-based pay decreases in SPI,...

Panel OLS and GMM-IV estimates indicate that executives respond to the adoption of a compensation clawback provision by decreasing firm risk. The mechanisms that transmit incentives to decisions and decisions to risk appear to be more conservative investment and financial policies and preemptive...

In contrast to bonds, cov-lite loans do not require SEC registration and are not subject to securities laws. We show that this distinction plays an important role in firms' choice between funding through cov-lite loans and bonds and helps understand why the market share of cov-lite loans has...

When government debt is sluggish, consumption exhibits lower expected growth, more long-run uncertainty, and more long-run downside risk. Simultaneously, the risk premium on the consumption claim (Koijen et al. (2010), Lustig et al. (2013)) increases and features more positive (adverse)...