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13.) "The Fed Information Effect and the Profitability Channel of Monetary Policy: Evidence and Theory." With Indrajit Mitra, Yu Xu, and Linghang Zeng, 2024.

We present evidence that the Fed's private information about economic conditions revealed through FOMC announcements affect firm investment. We use firm-level investment data and analyst forecasts of firm fundamentals to document three facts. First, the investment rate sensitivity to Fed information is greater for more cyclical firms. Second, revisions in analyst forecasts of firm fundamentals are greater for more cyclical firms. Third, the investment response is consistent with changes in firm profitability following Fed announcements. We propose a HANK model to explain these patterns. Our model rationalizes the slow decline in inflation in 2022-2023 despite aggressive policy rate hikes.

14.) "Public Debt and Private Investment: The Role of Firm Leverage." With Altan Pazarbasi, and Andrea Tamoni, 2024.

Surprisingly, firms with low leverage cut investment more than high-leverage firms when government debt rises. Investment responses are shaped by a cash flow channel of fiscal policy distinct from the standard discount rate mechanism. Low-leverage firms have significantly lower profitability after government debt rises, while government debt does not predict excess returns across leverage-sorted portfolios. We propose a heterogeneous firms model in which higher taxation weakens the cash flows of low-leverage firms because they have higher growth opportunities with long-dated cash flows. Rising government debt drives higher tax rates through a fiscal rule, thus generating disinvestment of low-leverage firms.

15.) "Asset Pricing with Hand-to-Mouth Households." 2017.

I develop a heterogeneous agent model in a general equilibrium production economy to analyze the asset pricing implications when the marginal pricer can potentially lose the ability to save and invest. Building on the saver-spender dichotomy of Mankiw (2000), an optimizing household (saver) is faced with the possibility of being switched to a hand-to-mouth household (spender), and vice versa, with time-varying probabilities. The baseline model is capable of generating large risk premia for both stocks and Treasury bonds while matching a set of macroeconomic moments. The potential to encounter a household-level rare-disaster-like switching shock results in a pricing kernel, purely driven by the saver's consumption process, that is the weighted average of the marginal utility of staying as a saver and the marginal utility of getting switched to a spender. The switching mechanism amplifies the covariances between the real pricing kernel and the return on dividend claims of firms as well as inflation. The former generates large equity risk premium while the latter produces large inflation risk premium on nominal bonds.

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