We investigate how debt financing responds to exposure to long-lived and temporary cash flow shocks. We identify these shocks using filtering methods that we demonstrate are highly effective for corporate finance data using Monte-Carlo simulations. The long-lived and temporary shocks we identify...

We show that the similarity of a firm's technological expertise with other firms affects outcomes in the managerial labor market. Using each firm's patent portfolio to estimate its technological expertise, we find that its similarity in technological expertise with other firms is strongly...

This paper examines the optimal incentive scheme in motivating people to innovate under ambiguity. When an innovation's prospects are ambiguous, the use of extrinsic, high-powered incentives can lead the agent's beliefs about the project's outcome to deviate from that of the principal's, which...