This paper describes the balance sheet adjustments of debt and equity financed firms over time in an economy subject to taste shocks. A model is developed that describes a representative firm with a stochastic diminishing returns technology and a set of financial contracts that resolve a conflict-of-interest problem between differentially risk-averse bondholders and stockholders. The contractual resolution of this conflict-of-interest problem between the two agents is shown to shape certain stylized facts of business cycles ignored in Keynesian and Classical models. Changes in investor risk aversion and equity valuations trigger real investment decisions that can cause business cycles. Bond covenants then have the firm adjusting its financing decisions so as to offset any risk-shifting associated with the investment decisions. Stockholders manage the asset side of the firm’s balance sheet while bondholders (regulators in the case of banks) manage the financing side. In this way the welfare of both investors is coalesced over the business cycle. A similar type of analysis accounts for the age distribution of workers, and the size distribution of firms over the business cycle. Evidence presented here and elsewhere fails to reject these predictions for the U.S. non-financial and financial corporate sectors.

There is a long-standing debate about the extent to which economic theory should inform econometric modeling and estimation. This debate is particularly evident in the program/policy evaluation literature, where reduced-form (experimental or quasi-experimental) and structural modeling approaches are often viewed as rival methodologies. Reduced-form proponents criticize the assumptions invoked in structural applications. Structural modeling advocates point to the limitations of reduced-form approaches in not being able to inform about program impacts prior to implementation or about the costs and benefits of program designs that deviate from the one that was implemented. In this paper, we argue that there is a new emerging view of a natural synergy between these two approaches, that they can be melded to exploit the advantages and ameliorate the disadvantages of each. We provide examples of how data from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the exemplar of reduced form practitioners, can be used to enhance the credibility of structural estimation. We also illustrate how the structural approach complements experimental analyses by enabling evaluation of counterfactual policies/programs. Lastly, we survey many recent studies that combine these methodologies in various ways across different subfields within economics.

We show how to use commuting flows to infer the spatial distribution of income within a city. A simple workplace choice model predicts a gravity equation for commuting flows whose destination fixed effects correspond to wages. We implement this method with cell phone transaction data from Dhaka and Colombo. Model-predicted income predicts separate income data, at the workplace and residential level, and by skill group. Unlike machine learning approaches, our method does not require training data, yet it achieves comparable predictive power. We show that hartals (transportation strikes) in Dhaka reduce commuting more for high model-predicted wage and high skill commuters.

We provide evidence that accruals quality in the U.S. has generally improved since 2000, following a decade of decline during the 1990s. Our results indicate that both the initial decline in accruals quality and the subsequent reversal can be explained by an inverse relation with operating cash flow volatility. Moreover, even though patterns of cash flow volatility and accruals quality vary in different regions of the world and relative to the U.S., we find evidence of an inverse relation between accruals quality and cash flow volatility globally. We corroborate our main results in a battery of additional tests, which also indicate that our results are not attributable to other explanations. Overall, our evidence challenges conventional wisdom and suggests that concerns about a sustained decline in accruals quality over time are unwarranted.

We investigate whether the PCAOB's decision to expand the number and location of its inspection offices in 2009 improved the reliability of US audits. We use a difference‐in‐differences empirical design to consider the impacts of the expansion on audit quality and find that audit quality significantly improved following the PCAOB's expansion in markets where new offices opened relative to markets without an office opening. We find that the improvement in audit quality appears to be driven by auditors' reaction to real changes in PCAOB oversight and that triennially inspected auditors appear to be impacted the most by this office expansion. Our findings provide new insights into the PCAOB's operational decision‐making and suggest that the regulator's additional investment in audit oversight was effective in improving audit quality.