Private equity fund managers are typically required to invest their own money alongside the fund. We examine how this coinvestment affects the acquisition strategy of leveraged buyout funds. In a simple model, where the investment and capital structure decisions are made simultaneously, we show...

We examine the incentive effects of private equity (PE) professionals' ownership in the funds they manage. In a simple model, we show that managers select less risky firms and use more debt financing the higher their ownership. We test these predictions for a sample of PE funds in Norway, where...

We examine how a firms' investment behavior affects the investment of a neighboring firm. Economic theory yields ambiguous predictions regarding the direction of firm peer effects and consistent with earlier work, we find that firms display similar investment behavior within an area using OLS...

We analyze the impact of decreases in available lending resources on quantitative and qualitative dimensions of firms' patenting activities. We thereby make use of the European Banking Authority?s capital exercise to carve out the causal effect of bank lending on firm innovation. In order to do...

This paper studies the long-run effects of credit market disruptions on real firm outcomes and how these effects depend on nominal wage rigidities at the firm level. I trace out the long-run investment and growth trajectories of firms which are more adversely affected by a transitory shock to...

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between firm leverage and risktaking. We embed the traditional agency problem of asset substitution within a multi-period model, revealing a U-shaped relationship between leverage and risktaking, evident in data from both the U.S. and Europe. Firms...

This paper examines banks' disclosures and loss recognition in the financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. Our analysis suggests that, going into the financial crisis, banks' disclosures about relevant risk exposures were...

This paper examines continuous-time models for the S&P 100 index and its constituents. We find that the jump process of the typical stock looks significantly different than that of the index. Most importantly, the average size of a jumps in the returns of the typical stock is positive, while it...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

This study examines the impact of ESG ratings on fund holdings, stock returns, and firm behavior. First, we show that among five major ESG ratings, only MSCI ESG can explain the holdings of US funds with an ESG mandate. We document that downgrades in the MSCI ESG rating substantially reduce...