This paper studies the impacts of the interactions between the changing macroeconomic conditions and the nature of competition on firms' investment timing decisions. With a model featuring business-cycle variations in both the profit level and the expected growth rate and volatility of the...

We examine the influence of economic downturns on the relation between diversification and firm value in a large panel of U.S. firms over the period from 1984 to 2014. When markets are incomplete or there are significant frictions, diversification provides value when the fortunes of one business...

In this paper I evaluate the contribution of financial frictions in explaining the drop in aggregate TFP through misallocation during the Great Recession. I build a quantitative model with heterogeneous establishments; with the help of the model I compute the counterfactual drop in...

I study the behavior of U.S. non-financial corporates after the financial crisis. I document an increase in the real debt holdings and correspondingly the leverage for these firms. Controlling for firm and time fixed effects, I find a higher long-term debt to asset ratio to be associated with...

The opportunity cost approach suggesting a countervailing cyclical effect between R&D and short-term investments is the subject of theoretical and empirical debate. The lack of firm-level panel data on R&D and ambiguous indicators for demand fluctuations has hindered empirical testing of...

Corporate managers tend to preserve cash with an expectation of a worse economy while spend cash to exercise growth opportunities with a favorable economic condition. We hypothesize that there exists a real option component of aggregate corporate cash holdings, serving both functions of...

We study the real effects of credit market sentiment on corporate investment and financing for a comprehensive panel of U.S. public and private firms over 1963-2016. In the short term, we find that high credit market sentiment in year t correlates with high corporate investment and debt issuance...

This paper investigates the mechanism of transmitting economic policy uncertainty (EPU) shocks to capital structure. We adopt a novel approach that bridges the asset pricing implications of EPU and the debt-financing decisions of Chinese firms by introducing a variable “policy-risk-induced...

We exploit Statement of Cash Flows data from Compustat to decompose firms' cash stocks by source and show that the rise in cash holdings since the late 1980s was driven by externally generated cash until 2000, and by internally generated cash afterwards. Firms stockpiling externally generated...

We consider the role of construction lags or time-to-build (TTB) in a firm's dynamic investment and financing decisions. We conjecture that construction lags can lead firms to finance large projects with equity so as to maintain financial flexibility during the construction period. After project...