This paper rationalizes empirical patterns of market leverage, book leverage, book-to-market ratios, and stock returns across different book-to-market portfolios, using a model of firm financing and investment. The model shows analytically that tax-deductibility of interest payments increases...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the firm with risk-free debt contracts, investment irreversibility, and debt restructuring costs. The model fits several stylized facts of corporate finance and asset pricing: First, book leverage is constant across different book-to-market portfolios,...

We present evidence of significant bias in event studies that investigate the effect of U.S. monetary policy on U.S. stock prices. To overcome this bias, we propose a new identification method based on the "Impossible Trinity" theory which argues that an economy with a fixed exchange rate and...

Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements contain both pure policy shocks and interest rate movements driven by central bank information about the economy. By analyzing interest rate changes on days of macroeconomic data releases, the impact of the central bank's information shocks can...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they...

With nominal interest rates at the zero lower bound, an important question for monetary policy is whether, as predicted in prior theoretical work, an increase in inflation expectations would boost current consumer spending. Using survey panel data for the period from April 2009 to November 2012,...

We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to study whether, how much, and why bank lending to firms matters for the transmission of monetary policy. The first new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of firms precisely, as the ratio of bank debt...

This paper attempts to identify how monetary policy shocks affect stock prices by using Mundell and Fleming's theory of the "Impossible Trinity". According to this theory, it is impossible to simultaneously have a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement (an absence of capital controls), and...