To extend and monitor loans, banks collect detailed and proprietary information about the financial prospects of their customers, many of whom are local businesses and households. Therefore, banks’ loan portfolios contain potentially useful information about local economic conditions. We...

We examine how the patterns of inter-industry trade flows impact the transfer of information and economic shocks. We provide evidence that the intensity of transfers depends on industries' positions within the economy. In particular, some industries occupy central positions in the flow of trade,...

We exploit a federal law that affords firms the ability to avoid paying overtime wages when an employee is classified as a manager and paid a salary above a pre-defined dollar threshold. We show that listings for salaried managerial positions exhibit an 89% increase around the regulatory...

This study sheds light on the extent to which the use of operating leases depends on reporting incentives, such as understating liabilities, and non-reporting incentives that partly arise from the overlap between accounting, bankruptcy, and tax laws, such as increasing financing capacity and...

A major difficulty in the analysis of factors that affect loan valuation is that there does not exist a measure of loan values that can be applied to the general population of loans. I use loan quality disclosures from commercial banks’ regulatory filings to construct a measure of realizable...