Firms with greater financial flexibility should be better able to fund a revenue shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 shock and benefit less from policy responses. We find that firms with high financial flexibility within an industry experience a stock price drop lower by 26% or 9.7 percentage...

During the COVID-19 market crash, U.S. stocks with higher institutional ownership -- in particular, those held more by active, short-term, and more exposed institutions -- performed worse. Portfolio changes through the first quarter of 2020 reveal that institutional investors prioritized...

I develop a dynamic model of financing decisions and optimal debt maturity choice in which creditors face adverse selection and learn about the firm's quality from news. In equilibrium, shareholders may choose to postpone debt issuance to reduce adverse selection and improve the pricing of newly...

We develop a dynamic model of banking to assess the effects of liquidity and leverage requirements on banks' insolvency risk. In this model, banks face taxation, flotation costs of securities, and default costs and maximize shareholder value by making their financing, liquid asset holdings, and...

We build a model of investment and financing decisions to study the choice between bonds and bank loans in a firm's marginal financing decision and its effects on corporate investment. We show that firms with more growth options, higher bargaining power in default, operating in more competitive...

How does product life cycle affect investment and financing? To answer this question, we structurally estimate a dynamic model where the firm chooses product portfolio characteristics that influence cash flow dynamics and shape corporate policies. In the model, the firm trades off higher...

Lending relationships matter for firm financing. In a model of debt dynamics, we study how lending relationships are formed and how they impact leverage and debt maturity choices. In the model, lending relationships evolve through repeated interactions between firms and debt investors. Stronger...

Is bank- versus market-based financing different in its attitudes towards Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risk? Using a novel sample covering 3,783 U.S. public firms from 2007 to 2020, we study how firm-level ESG risk affects its financing outcomes. We find that companies with higher...

We compile a rich dataset that links institutional investors' position level holdings with corporate bond characteristics and estimate demand elasticities with respect to critical sources of risk. Persistence in institutions' holdings provide us with an instrument to isolate exogenous movements...

We use a dynamic model of financing decisions to measure agency conflicts for a large panel of 12,652 firms from 14 countries. Our estimates show that agency conflicts are large and vary significantly across firms and countries. Differences in agency conflicts are largely due to differences in...