We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984-2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of...

Regulation is often funded with fees paid by regulated firms, potentially creating incentive problems. We use this feature to study the incentives of regulators and their ability to affect firm behavior. Theoretically, we show that firms that pay higher fees may face more lenient regulation,...

We find that shocks to the equity capital ratio of financial intermediaries—Primary Dealer counterparties of the New York Federal Reserve—possess significant explanatory power for crosssectional variation in expected returns. This is true not only for commonly studied equity and government...