Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires … that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value …-insensitive assets. For the economy as a whole, firms endogenously separate into bank finance and capital market/stock market finance …

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for …

Economic growth involves metamorphosis of the financial system. Forms of banks and bank money change. These changes, if … of crises. All financial crises are at root bank runs, because bank debt--of all forms--is vulnerable to sudden exit by … bank debt holders. The current crisis raises issues for crisis theory. And, empirically, studying crises is challenging …

We analyze a variant of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model of banking in which savers can use a bank to invest in a risky … project operated by an entrepreneur. The savers can buy equity in the bank and save via deposits. The bank chooses to invest … in a safe asset or to fund the entrepreneur. The bank and the entrepreneur face limited liability and there is a …

mismatch in their balance sheets. The data suggest that foreign banks had to borrow from the Federal Reserve Bank to meet their …

that has survived the worst of the economic and political crises of the last decades is highly profitable. Bank …

methodology to separate firm-borrowing shocks from bank supply shocks using a vast sample of matched bank-firm lending data. We … decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990 to 2010 into bank, firm, industry, and common shocks. The high degree of … role for granular shocks as in Gabaix (2011). As a result, bank supply shocks--i.e., movements in the supply of bank loans …