This article examines the conceptual transformation of what was once considered usury into finance. To counter traditional arguments that usury was exploitative and unnatural, early modern theorists reconceptualized debt as a form of investment for both borrowers and lenders. Today, this ethical...

We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

We offer evidence of a new stylized feature of corporate financing decisions: the tendency of managers to rely more on debt financing when earnings prospects are poor. We term this 'leaning against the wind' and consider three possible explanations: market timing, precautionary financing, and...