Intangible assets are a large and growing part of firms' capital stocks. Intangibles are
accumulated via investment—foregoing consumption today for output in the future—but they …

Macro-finance analyses commonly link firms' borrowing constraints to the liquidation value
of physical assets. For US nonfinancial firms, we show that 20% of debt by value is based on …

Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1865 through
2023 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are …

Using Y-14Q supervisory loan-level data, we investigate how relationship business
borrowers fare relative to others in loan contract terms (spread, maturity, collateral) during …

We study the nature of debt among US non-financial firms and its determinants. One
approach of debt enforcement lends against the liquidation value of discrete assets (such as …

An entrepreneur borrows from a relationship bank or the market. The bank has a higher cost
of capital but produces private information over time. While the entrepreneur accumulates …

We use variation in state corporate income tax rates to re-examine the relation between
taxes and corporate leverage. Contrary to prior research, we find that corporate leverage …

Using firm-level data from high-and middle-income European countries, I document
significant differences in firms' access to finance over their life cycles and across countries …

Since the early 1990s, the share of loans in total debt of US firms appears to have declined.
This paper explores the implications of this trend toward “disintermediation” for the …

Interventions in corporate credit markets were a major innovation in the policy response to
the 2020 recession. This paper develops and estimates a model to quantify their impact on …