This paper studies how U.S. monetary policy affects global stock prices. We find that global stock prices respond strongly to changes in U.S. interest rate policy, with stock prices increasing (decreasing) following unexpected monetary loosening (tightening). This impact is more pronounced for...

We conduct a randomized control trial that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Combined with detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 15-25 percent higher profits and...

Internationally active firms rely intensively on trade credits even though they are considered particularly expensive. This phenomenon has been little explored so far. Our theoretical analysis shows that trade credits can alleviate financial constraints arising from asymmetric information...

We develop a simple model to study the interactions between a supplier’s financial constraints and contract incompleteness in a vertical relationship. Production complexity increases the extent of contract incompleteness and the hold-up problem, which generates a cost when the supplier needs...

This paper examines the relationship between innovation and firms' dependence on external capital by analyzing the innovation activities of privately-held and publicly-traded firms We find that public firms in external finance dependent industries generate patents of higher quantity, quality,...

Financial constraints are fundamental to empirical research in finance and economics. We propose two novel tests to evaluate how well measures of financial constraints actually capture constraints. We find that firms classified as constrained according to five popular measures do not in fact...