Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

Uncertainty over future business conditions lies at the heart of firm decision-making. Uncertainty can arise from a myriad of sources and is difficult to measure. We present a simple conceptual framework showing how several key corporate decisions are affected by uncertainty. We also highlight...

We survey CFOs throughout the COVID-19 crisis to learn how multiple dimensions of corporate flexibility affect their short- and long-term business plans. We find that i) workplace flexibility, namely the ability for employees to work remotely, plays a central role in modulating firms’...

We use the 2007 credit crisis to assess the effect of financial contracting on real corporate behavior. We identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploring ex-ante variation in long-term debt maturity. Our empirical methodology uses an experiment-like...

We study the effect of asset tangibility on corporate financing and investment decisions. Financially constrained firms benefit the most from investing in tangible assets because those assets help relax constraints, allowing for further investment. Using a dynamic model, we characterize this...