Stringent labor laws can provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing innovative activities. Using patents and citations as proxies for innovation, we identify this effect by exploiting the time-series variation...

We build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases in producers' hedging demand or speculators' capital constraints increase hedging costs via price-pressure on futures....

What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? We develop a model where myopic governments seek popularity but can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when debt is low because they would lose access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending;...

Using deal-level data from transactions initiated by large private equity houses, we find that the abnormal performance of deals is positive on average, after controlling for leverage and sector returns. Higher abnormal performance is related to improvement in sales and operating margin during...

In August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for corporate borrowing. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and...

We argue that the fundamental cause of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 was that large, complex financial institutions ("LCFIs") took excessive leverage in the form of manufacturing tail risks that were systemic in nature and inadequately capitalized. We employ a set of headline facts about...

We analyze asset-backed commercial paper conduits, which experienced a shadow-banking run and played a central role in the early phase of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. We document that commercial banks set up conduits to securitize assets worth $1.3 trillion while insuring the newly...

In this review, we provide an economic assessment of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 in terms of the likely efficacy of the financial-sector regulation it proposes. We focus in particular on its ability to contain systemic risk, the risk that many financial firms may fail en masse, and discuss the...