Technological innovation in medical services can improve health, but its ability to reach patients often depends on price signals for downstream providers, which can also be discordant across production inputs. We examine such a context when Medicare sharply revises facility fees--while holding...

We explore the sources of racial disparities in small business lending by studying the $806 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was designed to support small business jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. PPP loans were administered by private lenders but federally guaranteed, largely...

Recent supply disruptions catapulted the issue of risk in global supply chains (GSCs) to the top of policy agendas and created the impression that shortages would have been less severe if GSCs were either shorter and more domestic, or more diversified. But is this right? We start our answer by...

COVID-19 has demonstrated the challenges that policymakers, insurers, businesses, and employees face when disaster assistance programs are developed after the pandemic has already started. There is now an opportunity to design and implement effective and efficient solutions to manage the...

We develop a theory of bank board risk committees. With this theory, such committees are valuable even though there is no expectation that bank risk is lower if the bank has a well-functioning risk committee. As predicted by our theory (1) many large and complex banks voluntarily chose to have a...

Irrigation in the Eastern US receives little attention compared to the West, but farmers in humid states of the US, traditionally reliant on rainfall, have more than tripled irrigation since 1978. We examine this trend in Illinois where there has been a nearly threefold increase in center pivot...

The average cash to assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms increases by 129% from 1980 to 2004. Because of this increase in the average cash ratio, American firms at the end of the sample period can pay back their debt obligations with their cash holdings, so that the average firm has no...

This paper is a comparative study of the responses to the 1995 Wharton School survey of derivative usage among US non-financial firms and a 1997 companion survey on German non-financial firms. It is not a mere comparison of the results of both studies, but a comparative study, drawing a...

In the face of rising interest rates in 2022, banks mitigated interest rate exposure of the accounting value of their assets but left the vast majority of their long-duration assets exposed to interest rate risk. Data from call reports and SEC filings shows that only 6% of U.S. banking assets...