We explore the relationship between sticky wages and risk. Like operating leverage, sticky wages are a source of risk for the firm. Firms, industries, regions, or times with especially high or rigid wages are especially risky. If wages are sticky, then wage growth should negatively forecast...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

This paper provides new evidence about the link between firm level total factor productivity (TFP) and stock returns. We estimate firm level TFP and show that it is strongly related to several firm characteristics such as size, the book to market ratio, investment, and hiring rate. Low...

I study the cross sectional variation of stock returns and technological progress using a dynamic equilibrium model with production. In the model, technological progress is endogenously driven by Ramp;D investment and is composed of two parts. One part is product innovation devoted to creating...

We study the impact of labor market frictions on asset prices. In the cross section of U.S. firms, a 10 percentage points increase in the firm's hiring rate is associated with a 1.5 percentage points decrease in the firm's annual risk premium. We propose an investment-based model with stochastic...

This paper examines the impact of Dollar exchange rate volatility on firm productivity in Emerging Markets economies (EMs). Using firm level data covering 16 EMs over the period 1998 -2019, the paper shows that dollar exchange rate volatility reduces firm productivity growth. Exploring channels,...

Productivity rises in booms and falls in recessions. There are four main explanations for this procyclical productivity: (i) procyclical technology shocks, (ii) widespread imperfect competition and increasing returns, (iii) variable utilization of inputs over the cycle, and (iv) resource...

This paper examines the role of firm turnover in explaining inflation dynamics. I augment a New-Keynesian DSGE model with endogenous entry and exogenous stochastic exit and estimate with the Bayesian full information approach for the US economy. Results show that shocks to the entry cost explain...

A typical (roughly) two-digit industry in the United States appears to have constant or slightly decreasing returns to scale. Three puzzles emerge, however. First, estimates often rise at higher levels of aggregation. Second, apparent decreasing returns contradicts evidence of only small...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...