This paper explores the relationship between the health of the financial sector and the rest of the economy. We develop an indicator of financial sector health using a distance-to-default measure based on a Merton-style option pricing model. Our measure spans over three decades and appears to...

Which of the strategies for financing constraints in economic models is the most empirically plausible? This paper tests two commonly used models of financing constraints, costly state verification (Townsend, 1979) and moral hazard (Holmström and Tirole, 1997), using a comprehensive data set of...

This paper reviews the theoretical literature at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance to draw lessons on the connection between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and on how monetary policy affects that connection. This literature finds that financial...

This paper reviews literature on the empirical relationship between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and how monetary policy affects that connection. Financial vulnerabilities build up over time, with both risk appetite and risk taking rising during economic...

Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely...

I compare the timing of information acquisition among institutional investors and sell-side analysts, and I show that hedge fund trades predict the direction of subsequent analyst ratings change reports while other investors' trades do not. In addition, hedge funds reverse trades after analyst...

The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds' liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry...

We show that when only a few investors own a substantial portion of a hedge fund's net asset value, flow volatility increases because investors' exogenous, idiosyncratic liquidity shocks are not diversified away. Using confidential regulatory filings, we confirm that high investor concentration...

We measure the liquidity profile of open-end mutual funds using the sensitivity of their daily returns to aggregate liquidity. We study how this sensitivity changes around real-activity macroeconomic announcements that reveal large surprises about the state of the economy and after three...

Asset purchases have become an important monetary policy tool of the Federal Reserve in recent years. To date, most studies of the Federal Reserve's asset purchases have tried to measure the interest rate effects of the policies. Several papers provide evidence that these programs do have...