I provide an explanation for the puzzle of slow recovery of aggregate real variables from financial crises. My model features a representative investor who finances firms with optimal long-term contracts derived from a moral hazard problem. An increase in uncertainty about firm-productivity...

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

Do recessions harm investment in technology and thus future aggregate supply? We provide novel evidence on this question using unique, granular data on innovation investment in R&D and diffusion from a representative survey of German firms. Our data allows to identify the crisis-induced...

Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded nonfinancial firms over the last century, we show that U.S. federal government debt issuance significantly affects corporate financial policies and balance sheets through its impact on investors' portfolio...

The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...

We estimate a time-varying parameter VAR (TVP-VAR) with stochastic volatility using post- WWII U.S. data to study the effects of uncertainty shocks on inflation. We find the response of inflation to be statistically insignificant until mid-to-late 1990s and negative thereafter. Our findings...

This paper analyzes whether differences in institutional structures on capital markets contribute to explaining why some OECD-countries, in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries, have been much more successful over the last two decades in producing employment growth and in reducing unemployment...