Firms finance intangible investment through employee compensation contracts. In a dynamic model in which intangible capital is embodied in a firm’s employees, we analyze the firm’s optimal decisions on intangible capital investment, employee compensation contracts, and financial leverage. Employee financing is achieved by delaying wage payments in the form of future claims. We show that intangible capital investment is highly correlated with employee financing but not with debt issuance or regular equity refinancing. In our quantitative analysis, we show that this new channel of employee financing explains the cross-industry differences in leverage and financing patterns.

In a monetary union, the risk-free rate cannot adjust to country-level fiscal positions, leaving only default spreads and convenience yields to respond. Empirically, we find that convenience yields explain a large share of the variation in eurozone (EZ) sovereign bond yields. EZ sovereign bonds earn larger convenience yields when their governments run larger surpluses. Since convenience yields generate substantial seigniorage revenue from debt issuance, our estimates imply economically large fiscal costs from low convenience yields for peripheral countries in the EZ.

The government budget constraint ties the market value of government debt to the expected present discounted value of fiscal surpluses. We find evidence that U.S. Treasury investors fail to impose this no‐arbitrage restriction in the United States. Both cyclical and long‐run dynamics of tax revenues and government spending make the surplus claim risky. In a realistic asset pricing model, this risk in surpluses creates a large gap between the market value of debt and its fundamental value, the PDV of surpluses, suggesting that U.S. Treasuries may be overpriced.

We study three centuries of fiscal history. Dominant safe asset suppliers issue more debt than future primary surpluses can justify, even after accounting for seigniorage revenue from convenience yields. This pattern holds for the Dutch Republic (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries), the United Kingdom (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries), and the United States (twentieth to twenty-first centuries). When Dutch and UK fiscal fundamentals deteriorated, they lost their dominant position as the safe asset supplier, and their debt became fully backed by primary surpluses. Exorbitant privilege stems from issuing overpriced debt in the early stage, followed by bondholder losses and financial repression in the later stage.