Prior to the subprime crisis, mortgage brokers charged higher percentage fees for loans that turned out to be riskier ex post, even when conditioning on other risk characteristics. High conditional fees reveal borrower attributes that are associated with high borrower risk, such as suboptimal...

I document an abnormal increase in the price of default insurance for target firms at the time of an activist hedge fund intervention, despite an abnormal decrease in expected default losses. After the intervention, credit spreads remain abnormally high for confrontational activist campaigns but...

We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are used in addition to aggregate macroeconomic...

We propose an equilibrium model of over-the-counter corporate bond trading with short selling, asymmetric information and dealer inventory costs. The model predicts that higher inventory costs impose implicit short-sale constraints on informed investors and are thus associated with lower price...

We develop an equilibrium model for origination fees charged by mortgage brokers and show how the equilibrium fee distribution depends on borrowers' valuation for their loans and their information about fees. We use non-crossing quantile regressions and data from a large subprime lender to...

If the primary purpose of raising debt levels was to finance growth opportunities, then higher debt levels would signal greater post-payout returns on assets but contain no information about firm leverage. Using annual data in real terms for more than 5,400 public US non-financial firms from...