Corporate Finance

Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for relevant dimensions of worker and firm heterogeneity, we uncover a positive and significant young-firm pay premium. Furthermore, we show that worker selection at firm birth is related to future firm dynamics, including survival and growth.

In thenance literature, a common practice is to create characteristic portfolios by sorting on characteristics associated with average returns. We show that the resulting portfolios are likely to capture not only the priced risk associated with the characteristic, but also unpriced risk. We develop a procedure to remove this unpriced risk using covariance information estimated from past returns. We apply our methodology to the ve Fama and French (2015) characteristic portfolios.

We develop a model of investment timing under uncertainty for a financially constrained firm. Facing external financing costs, the firm prefers to fund its investment through internal funds, so that the firm's optimal investment policy and value depend on both its earnings fundamentals and liquidity holdings. We show that financial constraints significantly alter the standard real options results, with the financial flexibility conferred by internal funds acting as a complement, and at times as a substitute, to the real flexibility given by the optimal timing of investment.

Over the past decade, data has transformed everyday life. While it has changed the way people shop and businesses operate (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2019), it has only just begun to permeate economists thinking about the aggregate economy. In the early twentieth century, economists like Schultz (1943) analyzed agrarian economies and land-use issues. As agricultural productivity improved, production shifted more to manufacturing. Modern macroeconomics adapted with models featuring capital and labor, markets for goods, and equilibrium wages (Solow, 1956).

We find that an increase in the "unusualness" of news with negative sentiment predicts an increase in stock market volatility. Similarly, unusual positive news forecasts lower volatility. Our analysis is based on more than 360,000 articles on 50 large financial companies, published in 1996–2014. Unusualness interacted with sentiment forecasts volatility at both the company-specific and aggregate level. These effects persist for several months. Furthermore, unusual news is reflected in volatility more slowly at the aggregate than at the company-specific level.

Innovations in volatility constitute a potentially important asset pricing risk factor that can be tested using the return on variance swaps. We characterize the exposures of returns on equities, bonds and currencies in all regions of the world to U.S. based equity variance risk. We explore implications for global risk premiums and asset return comovements using developed and emerging markets. Regional portfolios across all three asset classes and practically all countries exhibit negative loadings on the variance risk factor.

We use a labor-search model to explain why the worst employment slumps often follow expansions of household debt. We find that households protected by limited liability suffer from a household-debt-overhang problem that leads them to require high wages to work. Firms respond by posting high wages but few vacancies. This vacancy-posting effect implies that high household debt leads to high unemployment.

We propose a simple measure of de facto financial market integration based on a factor model of monthly equity returns, which can be computed back to the first era of financial globalization for 17 countries. Global financial market integration follows a "swoosh" shape — i.e. high pre-1913, still higher post-1990, low in the interwar period — rather than the other shapes hypothesized in earlier literature. We find no evidence of financial globalization reversing since the Great Recession as claimed in other recent studies.

We propose the standard neoclassical model of investment under uncertainty with short-run adjustment frictions as a benchmark for earnings-return patterns absent accounting influences. We show that our proposed benchmark generates a wide range of earnings-return patterns documented in prior accounting research. Notably, our model generates a concave earnings-return relation, similar to that of Basu [1997], and predicts that the earnings-return concavity increases in the volatility of firms' underlying shock processes and decreases in investment levels.