Investments in new ventures involve financial contracts between an entrepreneur and outside investors. Investors, such as venture capital firms, represent well-diversified investors. In contrast, the entrepreneur must commit a substantial fraction of human and financial capital to the venture....

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

This paper investigates the effects of employee mobility on industry evolution and technology diffusion by testing a dynamic industry equilibrium model introduced in Franco and Filson (1999). The model focuses on a particular type of employee mobility: researchers can leave existing firms and...

In this paper, I provide new evidence on the existence of the credit channel for monetary policy by investigating the response of firm investment to the changes in monetary policy through leverage. Using several measures of monetary tightness, I find that monetary contractions reduce the growth...

Filson (2001) uses industry-level data on firm numbers, price, quantity, and quality along with an equilibrium model of industry evolution to estimate the nature and effects of quality and cost improvement in the personal computer industry and four other new industries. This paper studies the...

There is considerable disagreement among analysts about the extent to which the spread of the Asian crisis was based on reasonable changes in expectations about fundamentals versus pure contagion effects resulting from imperfections in the behavior of currency and financial markets. In this...