Working Papers

This paper explores the dynamics of corporate leverage when funding decisions are made in the interests of shareholders. In the absence of prior commitments or regulations, shareholder-creditor conflicts give rise to a leverage ratchet effect,...

Observed contracts in the real-world are often very simple, partly reflecting the constraints faced by contracting firms in making the contracts more complex. We focus on one such rigidity, the constraints faced by firms in...

From 1980 to 2000, the rise in the U.S. college-high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. This paper estimates a structural spatial...

The federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar installations is scheduled to step-down from 30% to 10% at the beginning of 2017 for corporate investors. This raises the question whether solar PV will be cost...

Building on research in psychology, we predict that unpleasant weather negatively affects capital market participants’ moods and activity levels, causing a muted response to information events. Exploiting within firm-quarter tests, we find that analysts experiencing...

We analyze the role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets subject to search frictions. The publication of a benchmark can, under conditions, raise total social surplus by (i) increasing the volume of beneficial trade, (ii) reducing...

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects which benefit special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments’ abilities to extract...

We estimate the spillovers of properties financed by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) onto surrounding neighborhood residents. We nonparametrically estimate the impact of LIHTC development on nearby house prices by developing a new...

The standard paradigm in the empirical literature is to treat consumers as passive recipients of advertising, with the level of ad exposure determined by firms’ targeting technology and the intensity of advertising supplied in the...