This paper reveals and tests a new theoretical implication of the credit channel of monetary policy: as financial frictions (monitoring or auditing costs) increase, the reaction of stock prices to monetary policy shocks decreases. Correspondingly, towards the end of the Enron accounting scandal,...

After a long period of loose monetary policy triggered by the Great Recession, some central banks are signaling that they will raise their policy rates soon. Previous research, for example, Bernanke and Kuttner (2005) and Ozdagli (2014), has shown that asset prices react more strongly to...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the firm with risk-free debt contracts, investment irreversibility, and debt restructuring costs. The model fits several stylized facts of corporate finance and asset pricing: First, book leverage is constant across different book-to-market portfolios,...

Fama and French (1992) suggest that the positive value premium results from risk of financial distress. However, recent empirical research has found that financially distressed firms have lower stock returns, using empirical estimates of default probabilities. This paper reconciles the positive...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on aggregate stock market returns in narrow event windows around press releases by the Federal Open Market Committee. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct (demand) effect and an indirect...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on stock returns in narrow windows around press releases by the Federal Reserve. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and an indirect (network) effect. We attribute 50%-85% of the...

We study the importance of production networks for the transmission of macroeconomic shocks using the stock market reaction to monetary policy shocks as a laboratory. We decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and a network effect and attribute 50 to 85...

We present a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college degree in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After matriculating and taking some exams, students reevaluate their...