Recurrent clustered episodes of corporate default are a long-standing puzzle that standard models driven by observable fundamentals struggle to explain. We develop a general equilibrium model where demand externality generates such default cycles endogenously through a self-fulfilling mechanism. In our framework, a decline in aggregate output reduces individual firm revenues and values, raising default risk. The subsequent exit of defaulting firms further depresses aggregate output, creating a positive feedback loop and pessimistic expectations about defaults can become self-fulfilling. This mechanism generates multiple equilibria and features endogenous, sentiment-driven default cycles. A global dynamic analysis using Bogdanov–Takens bifurcation reveals a rich set of dynamics, including periodic orbits, that are overlooked by standard local analysis. Our framework thus provides a microfounded explanation for business cycle patterns driven by internal economic forces, as emphasized by the empirical literature

Using comprehensive patent data, we document: (1) multinational affiliates and their foreign parent firms comprise a significant portion of patents filed in China; and (2) there are subsequent transfers and spillovers of these technologies to domestic firms. Guided by this evidence, we develop a model of multinational production featuring cross-country idea flows, transfers, and spillovers. Quantitatively, we find that without multinational production and knowledge spillovers, the idea stock owned by China would drop by 30%. Furthermore, due to the externalities of multinationals through technology transfers and spillovers, subsidizing multinationals will at most increase real income by 8% in China.

Credit expansions stimulate the economy. We quantify the contribution of households versus firms for this stimulus. Using causal evidence from the quasi-natural experiment of bank deregulation across US states, we estimate a small open-economy heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model. Deregulation generated lower borrowing costs. Firms' responses to such shocks account for most of the long-run rise in output and employment. For short-run dynamics, firms and households are equally important. Firms' large role is identified by an empirical observation: output and employment expanded gradually following deregulation. In the model, lower interest rates generate increasing capital stocks which in turn increases economic activity gradually.

We document significant increases in the suspension of ongoing drug projects following the passage of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA), which mandates that pharmaceutical companies publicly disclose detailed clinical study results. Our results suggest a causal interpretation through difference-in-differences analyses that exploit variations in pre-FDAAA information environments. We also show evidence that fewer new projects are initiated after the FDAAA. Drug developers’ learning from peer failures is the primary mechanism, further amplified by financial constraints. We also examine the consequences of enhanced information disclosure, including changes in firm investment efficiency, drug quality, and disease morbidity.

We uncover a new real effect of harmonizing accounting standards on international trade: following a mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards, exporters experiencing a greater change in reporting requirements become more successful in defending against foreign antidumping cases. The effect is also stronger with better reporting enforcement and is robust to excluding exporters from non-market economies. We discuss channels through which accounting-standards globalization facilitates efficient trade by either mitigating importing countries’ protectionism or curtailing exporters’ dumping activities.

Firm-level evidence suggests that turbulence that reshuffles firms’ productivity rankings rises sharply in recessions. An increase in turbulence reallocates labor and capital from high- to low-productivity firms, reducing aggregate TFP and the stock market value of firms. A real business cycle model with heterogeneous firms and financial frictions can generate the observed macroeconomic and reallocation effects of turbulence. In the model, increased turbulence makes high-productivity firms less likely to remain productive, reducing their expected equity values and tightening their borrowing constraints relative to low-productivity firms. This leads to a reallocation that reduces aggregate TFP. Unlike uncertainty, turbulence changes both the conditional mean and the conditional variance of the firm productivity distribution, enabling a turbulence shock to generate a recession with synchronized declines in aggregate activities.

Digital advancements have revolutionized customer service by enabling custo-mers to easily express dissatisfaction and request resolutions through online platforms.Customer complaint management platforms are especially unique in facilitating provider-customer interactions, but researchers overlook implications from service provider ano-nymity. In this article, two randomized field experiments are conducted to examine acustomer complaint management platform to identify how disclosure of service provideridentity affects service performance, customer satisfaction, and biases in customers. Study1, a large-scale randomized field experiment involving 75,041 customers and 1,280 serviceproviders across 672 companies, finds that identity disclosure improves provider perfor-mance. This improvement is achieved by removing the provider’s dissociative anonymity,mitigating deindividuation, instilling self-awareness, and motivating personal responsibil-ity. This effect is stronger for inexperienced service providers who wor

Export activity shapes workers' experience-wage profiles. Using employer-employee and customs data for Brazilian manufacturing, we document that workers' experience-wage profiles are steeper at exporters than at non-exporters and, among exporters, steeper at exporters shipping to high-income destinations. We develop and quantify a model featuring worker-firm wage bargaining, export-market entry by multi-worker firms, and human capital accumulation by workers to interpret the data. Human capital growth can explain one-half of the differences in wage profiles between exporters and non-exporters. We show that increased human capital per worker can account for one-half of the overall gains in real income from trade openness.

We examine whether CEOs use share repurchases to sell their equity at inflated prices. We document that share repurchases, like equity-based compensation, are affected by the corporate calendar-the firm's schedule of earnings announcements and insider trading restrictions. The corporate calendar can fully explain why share repurchases and equity-based compensation coincide. The alignment with the corporate calendar is stricter in firms with strong internal governance or high external monitoring. When CEOs sell equity, firms are actually less likely to repurchase. Our findings reconcile earlier studies and highlight the importance of the corporate calendar for the timing of share repurchases.

This paper studies the impacts of financial shocks on firm insurance, firm dynamics, and macroeconomic implications. A key departure from the literature is that firms provide wage insurance contracts to risk-averse workers in a long-term relationship. Such contracts endogenously impose a form of inflexible debt liability to firms, and make firms with limited financial net worth more vulnerable to shocks than others. In our model, firms have heterogenous productivity and financial net worth, and also firms face financial frictions. Search and matching in the labor market endogenously determines the value of wage contract, and thus the level of liability to the firm. We have three new findings: (1) The wage dynamics of the quantitative model are consistent with those in empirical studies, with significant insurance against firm-level idiosyncratic shocks, and also a weak comovement between aggregate wage and GDP when there are aggregate shocks. (2) Firms with limited financial resources are hit by financial sho