Together with a sense of entering a New Economy, the US experienced in the second half of the 1990s an economic expansion, a stock market boom, a financing boom for new firms and productivity gains. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of these events within a general equilibrium model with financial frictions and decreasing returns to scale in production. We show that the mere prospect ...

Owner-managers of private companies are often highly underdiversified. We investigate the consequences of underdiversification at the company level. Information on US companies and their owner-managers is obtained from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Small Business Finances. Underdiversification, measured as the share of the owner-manager’s net worth invested in the company, h...

This paper develops a framework for stress-testing the credit risk of Chinese commercial banks to macroeconomic shocks. Using data over the period 1985-2008, this study establishes a vector auto-regression (VAR) model to describe the links between default rate and macroeconomic factors, and then designs three stress scenarios to implement the stress testing by Monte Carlo simulation. As a resul...

We examine information aggregation regarding industry capital productivity from privately informed managers in a dynamic model with optimal incentive contracts. Information cascades always occur if managers enjoy limited liability: when beliefs regarding productivity become endogenously extreme (optimistic or pessimistic), learning stops. There is no learning if initial beliefs are extreme, or ...

I test theories of the recent financial crisis by studying how banks’ pre-crisis investments connect to their CEOs’ beliefs. Using different proxies for beliefs, I find banks with larger housing investments and worse crisis performance had CEOs who were more optimistic ex ante. Banks with the most optimistic CEOs experienced 20 percentage points higher real estate loan growth, and 15 percentage...

G00–G09, Inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system G10–G14, Systemic atrophies primarily affecting the central nervous system G20–G26, Extrapyramidal and movement disorders G30–G32, Other degenerative diseases of the nervous system G35–G37, Demyelinating diseases of the central nervous system G40–G47, Episodic and paroxysmal disorders G50–G59, Nerve, nerve root, and plexus disorders G...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building. We test this result with a laboratory experiment. We find that, when the problem of product market opportunism is moderate, i.e., reputation formation equilibri...

The paper explores factors that lead to accumulation or decumulation of firms’ cash reserves. In particular, we empirically examine whether additional future fixed capital and R&D investment expenditures induce firms to change their liquidity ratio while considering the role of market imperfections. Implementing a dynamic framework on a panel of US, UK and German firms, we find that firms in al...

This paper empirically examines the role of diversification in export markets on firm-level R&D activities taking account of the potential endogeneity in this relationship. We show that geographical sales diversification across different regions of the world induces UK firms to increase their R&D expenditures, as firms must innovate and develop new products to maintain a competitive edge over t...

We assess the impact of the geographic expansion of bank assets on the cost of banks’ interestbearing liabilities. Existing research suggests that expansion can both intensify agency problems that increase funding costs and facilitate risk diversification that decreases funding costs. Using a newly developed identification strategy, we discover that the geographic expansion of banks across U.S....