The 2007-2009 recession is characterized by: a large drop in employment, an unprecedented decline in firm entry, and a slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data, I show that financial constraints reduced employment growth in small relative to large firms by 4.8 to 10.5 percentage points....

We examine the impact of banks' liquidity risk management on secondary loan sales. We track the dynamics of bank loan share ownership in the secondary market using data from the Shared National Credit Program, a credit register of syndicated bank loans administered by U.S. regulators. We analyze...

We study the performance and behavior of Value at Risk (VaR) measures used by a number of large banks during and before the financial crisis. Alternative benchmark VaR measures, including GARCH-based measures, are also estimated directly from the banks' trading revenues and help to explain the...

Using data on a broad set of European firms, we find a strong positive relationship between the use of external financing and future productivity (TFP) growth within firms. This relationship is robust to various measures of financing and productivity, and strengthens as financing costs increase....

Whether bank failures have adverse effects on local economies is an important question for which there is conflicting and relatively scarce evidence. In this study, I use county-level data to examine the effect of bank failures and resolutions on local economies. Using quasi-experimental...

We examine the impact of banks' liquidity risk management on secondary loan sales. We track the dynamics of bank loan share ownership in the secondary market using data from the Shared National Credit Program, a credit register of syndicated bank loans administered by U.S. regulators. We analyze...

Ramsey models of fiscal and monetary policy with perfectly-competitive product markets and a fixed supply of capital predict highly volatile inflation with no serial correlation. In this paper, we show that an otherwise-standard Ramsey model that incorporates capital accumulation and habit...

Monetary policy reaction functions are compared in a simple optimizing model with one-period nominal stickiness, i.i.d. shocks, and no capital accumulation. The interest rate is the instrument and is either kept constant, "interest rate targeting" for short, or used in targeting one of the...

This paper uses the transcripts from the FOMC meetings to characterize the interactions between policymakers and macro models in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy. We develop a taxonomy of these interactions and present two case studies. The first case focuses on the debate on the choice...