Financial constraints preclude many surplus producing economic transactions, and inhibit the growth of many others. This paper models financial constraints as the interaction of two forces: the agent has persistent private information and is strapped for cash. The wedge between the optimal and...

More than a quarter of working-age households in the United States do not have sufficient savings to cover their expenditures after a month of unemployment. Recent proposals suggest giving workers early access to a small portion of their future Social Security benefits to finance their...

We investigate potential mechanisms through which market-wide sentiment affects firms' innovation activities. We provide evidence for the financing channel by showing that financially constrained firms are more likely to issue equity and invest more in research and development (R&D) than...

I construct a multi-industry model to study the effects of industrial credit policies. This model features both industrial interaction and firm heterogeneity, and is calibrated to China's data. According to the calibrated parameters, in China, downstream firms face tighter credit constraint than...

This paper investigates whether financially constrained firms use costly audit signals to facilitate their access to external financing. We document that when facing higher financial constraints, firms pay higher audit fees and have their audit opinion reports completed sooner. The higher audit...

We investigate how a combination of limited liability and preexisting debt distort firms' investment and equity payout decisions. We show that equity holders have incentives to “double-sell” cash flows in default, leading to overinvestment, provided that the firm has preexisting debt and the...

We investigate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role played by credit constraints in the transmission mechanism, using a novel survey of expectations and plans of Italian firms, taken just before and after the outbreak. Most firms revise downward their expectations for...

We provide a direct, experimental test of the buffer stock model of savings behavior. We use a three-period inter-temporal model of consumption/savings decisions where liquidity in the second period is constrained (and, thus, borrowing is not possible). We contrast behavior in this constrained...

This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a...