Big data on job-vacancy postings reveal several dimensions of the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. job market. Firms have cut back on postings for high-skill jobs more than for low-skill jobs, with small firms nearly halting their new hiring altogether. New-hiring cuts and downskilling are most...

We use the COVID shock to study the direct and interactive effects of several forms of corporate flexibility on short- and long-term real business plans. We find that i) workplace flexibility, namely the ability for employees to work remotely, plays a central role in determining firms'...

We develop a model in which investment risk drives the demand for CDS insurance. The model shows the efficiency of CDS contracting over the state of the economy. It shows that CDS overinsurance (insurance in excess of renegotiation surpluses) is procyclical, allowing for greater financing when...

This paper develops a test for forecast bias that is robust to (a) correlated information amongst analysts; (b) common unforecasted industry-wide earnings shocks; (c) information arrival at different points of the forecast horizon; and (d) the possibility that the measure of earnings that...

Exploring the functioning of internal capital markets in financial conglomerates, this paper conducts a novel test of the credit channel of monetary policy. We look at differences in the response of lending to monetary policy shocks across small banks that are affiliated with the same bank...

Research on capital structure-product market interactions has traditionally sought to establish whether debt financing either hurts or boosts firm performance. This paper proposes that both of these competitive outcomes are likely to emerge in an industry setting: debt can hurt and boost a...

This paper investigates whether firms manage analyst forecasts to generate positive earnings surprises and the consequences of such forecast management. We first document that firms quot;talk downquot; forecasts. Forecasts of quarterly earnings issued later in the forecasting horizon grow...

This paper investigates internal capital markets in financial conglomerates by studying the responses of small banks to changes in monetary policy. I find that if a small bank operates on a stand-alone basis, then that bank's loan growth becomes significantly more dependent on its own cash flows...

This paper provides firm- and industry-level evidence on the effects of capital structure on product market outcomes for a large cross-section of industries. The analysis uses shocks to aggregate demand as surrogates for exogenous changes in the product market environment, dealing with concerns...