Highly variable returns, asymmetric information and a lack of collateral should cause small high-tech firms to have poor access to debt. New equity financing has several advantages over debt, but may be costly compared to internal finance. We examine an unbalanced panel of over 2,400 publicly...

How did investors holding assets backed by subprime residential mortgages react when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the so-called "teaser freezer" plan to modify mortgages in December 2007? We apply event-study methodology to the ABX index, the only source of daily securities prices in...

This paper examines the long-standing theory that the growth of small firms is often constrained by the quantity of internal finance. Under plausible assumptions, when financing constraints are binding, an additional dollar of internal finance should generate slightly more than an additional...

The tools of countercyclical monetary policy have been brought fully to bear on a potentially severe recession. This note argues, however, that such a policy is less effective in times such as these--that is, when uncertainty is especially high--and so is likely to be particularly ineffective in...

This study provides new evidence of the importance of financing constraints for explaining the dramatic cycles in inventory investment. We compare the empirical performance of different financial variables (coverage ratio, cash stocks, and cash flow) used in previous research to test for the...

Two explanations characterize the nature of information asymmetries in corporate investment-financing decisions. Models based on finance constraints argue that information-driven cost differentials between internal and external finance may leave profitable investment projects unexploited. Models...

How did investors holding assets backed by subprime residential mortgages react when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the so-called "teaser freezer" plan to modify mortgages in December 2007? We apply event-study methodology to the ABX index, the only source of daily securities prices in...

A well-known but under-emphasized feature of the business cycle is that the flow of internal finance is highly procyclical. We argue that finance constraints lead firms to offset a large proportion of internal finance fluctuations through inventory (dis)investment. We construct three panels of...

Over the last decade, research has shown that financing constraints have an important impact on many aspects of firm behavior and aggregate fluctuations. This paper undertakes a critical comparison of the three main financing constraint hypotheses- -the bank lending, collateral, and internal...