Corporate Finance

According to conventional wisdom, banks play a special role in providing liquidity in bad times, while capital markets are used to fund investment in good times. Using microdata on corporate balance sheets following the COVID-19 shock, we provide evidence that instead, the corporate bond market is central to firms' access to liquidity, crowding out bank loans even when the crisis did not originate in the banking sector. We first show that, contrary to good times, bond issuance is used to increase holdings of liquid assets rather than for real investment.

Using loan-level data covering two-thirds of all corporate loans from U.S. banks, we document that SMEs (i) obtain much shorter maturity credit lines than large firms; (ii) have less active maturity management and therefore frequently have expiring credit; (iii) post more collateral on both credit lines and term loans; (iv) have higher utilization rates in normal times; and (v) pay higher spreads, even conditional on other firm characteristics. We present a theory of loan terms that rationalizes these facts as the equilibrium outcome of a trade-off between commitment and discretion.

We analyze methods for selecting topics in news articles to explain stock returns. We find, through empirical and theoretical results, that supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (sLDA) implemented through Gibbs sampling in a stochastic EM algorithm will often overfit returns to the detriment of the topic model. We obtain better out-of-sample performance through a random search of plain LDA models. A branching procedure that reinforces effective topic assignments often performs best. We test these methods on an archive of over 90,000 news articles about S&P 500 firms.

The SEC should reform 144A regulation to prevent Wall Street streaking further ahead.

Using US Census employer-employee matched data, I show that employer financial distress accelerates the exit of employees to found start-ups. This effect is particularly evident when distressed firms are less able to enforce contracts restricting employee mobility into competing firms. Entrepreneurs exiting financially distressed employers earn higher wages prior to the exit and after founding start-ups, compared to entrepreneurs exiting non-distressed firms. Consistent with distressed firms losing higher-quality workers, their start-ups have higher average employment and payroll growth.

The largest economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic could arise from changes in behavior long after the immediate health crisis is resolved. A potential source of such a long-lived change is scarring of beliefs, a persistent change in the perceived probability of an extreme, negative shock in the future. We show how to quantify the extent of such belief changes and determine their impact on future economic outcomes. We nd that the long-run costs for the U.S. economy from this channel is many times higher than the estimates of the short-run losses in output.

We study the nature of firm pay dynamics using matched employer-employee and firm financials data from Sweden. To this end, we propose and estimate a statistical model that extends the seminal framework by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999b) to account for idiosyncratically time-varying firm pay policies. We validate the model by showing that firm-year pay estimates are systematically related to measures of firm performance.

This paper estimates a structural model of unconventional monetary policy transmission through bank balance sheets using cross-sectional instruments for loan and deposit demand. We estimate the demand for banking at a branch-specific level from the response of a bank's quantities at one branch to interest rate changes caused by demand shocks at other branches. Depositors are considerably less sensitive to interest rates than corporate or mortgage borrowers.

Using a novel dataset of over 3,500 public and private firms, we construct the network of firm connections through executives and directors on the eve of the 1929 financial market crash. We find that more connected firms have 17% higher 10-year survival rates on average. Consistent with a role in facilitating access to working capital, the results are particularly strong for small firms, private firms, cash-poor firms, and firms located in counties with high bank suspension rates during the crisis.