By considering yearly production growth rates for several manufacturing industries in more than one hundred countries during (roughly) the last forty years, we show that industries that are more dependent on external finance are hit harder during recessions. The observed difference in the...

Economists have traditionally viewed futures prices as fully informative about future economic activity and asset prices. We argue that open interest could be more informative than futures prices in the presence of hedging demand and limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We find...

The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and financial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP and stock returns varies across gender,...