We use the 2007 credit crisis to assess the effect of financial contracting on real corporate behavior. We identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploring ex-ante variation in long-term debt maturity. Our empirical methodology uses an experiment-like...

Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

We use the 2007 credit crisis to assess the effect of financial contracting on real corporate behavior. We identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploring ex-ante variation in long-term debt maturity. Our empirical methodology uses an experiment-like...

Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. However, although discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms...

This paper uses a unique dataset to study how firms managed liquidity during the financial crisis. Our analysis provides new insights on the interactions between internal liquidity, external funds, and real corporate decisions, such as investment and employment. We first describe how companies...

We survey 1,050 CFOs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to assess whether their firms are credit constrained during the global credit crisis of 2008. We study whether corporate spending plans differ conditional on this measure of financial constraint. Our evidence indicates that constrained firms...