Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings are safer and should have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive and higher for lower credit ratings. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for...

Material news events can be potentially important sources of jumps in stock returns. We collect 21 million news articles associated with more than 9,000 publicly-traded companies and use textual analyses to derive measures to summarize the news. We find that stock return jumps (including...

We introduce labor-force heterogeneity in a neoclassical investment model. In the baseline model, we highlight the fact that labor adjustment costs are higher for high skilled workers than for low skilled workers. The model predicts that the negative hiring-expected return relation should be...

We show that labor market frictions are first-order for understanding credit markets. Wage growth and labor share forecast aggregate credit spreads and debt growth as well as or better than alternative predictors. They also predict credit risk and debt growth in a cross-section of international...

This paper investigates whether risks associated with time-varying arrival of jumps and their effect on the dynamics of higher moments of returns are priced in the conditional mean of daily market excess returns. We find that jumps and jump dynamics are significantly related to the market equity...

A potential important source of jumps in stock returns can be material news events. In this paper, we collect 21 million news articles associated with more than 9000 publicly-traded companies and use textual analysis to derive measures summarizing those news. We find that measures of news flow...

We present a rationale for bidder termination provisions that considers their effect on bidders' and targets' joint takeover gains. The provision's inclusion can create value by enabling termination when the target becomes less valuable to the bidder than on its own, but creates a trade-off...

This paper identifies an important source of variation in U.S. firms' material information flows: their SEC current report filing frequency. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in this novel proxy for information intensity, this paper finds that firms with higher information intensity...

Examining the contractual disclosures during the sale of private-label residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) before the 2008 financial crisis, we find that textual contents in the risk-factor section predict subsequent losses and yet were not reflected in pricing. Insurance companies,...