We study loans from banking and non-banking lenders to different groups of borrowers in order to unveil significant differences on how those respond to a shock and evaluate possible alternative explanations for such differences. The objective is to gain insights useful to explain the loan...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk...

We propose a model that delivers endogenous variations in term spreads driven primarily by banks’ portfolio decision and their appetite to bear the risk of maturity transformation. We first show that fluctuations of the future profitability of banks’ portfolios affect their ability to cover...

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

In this paper, I provide an economic perspective on policy issues related to student debt in the United States. I lay out the economic rationale for government provision of student loans, summarize time trends in student borrowing, describe the US loan market, then turn to topics central to the...

Shocks to bank lending, risk-taking and securitization activities that are orthogonal to real economy and monetary policy innovations account for more than 30 percent of U.S. output variation. The dynamic effects, however, depend on the type of shock. Expansionary securitization shocks lead to a...

This paper documents that an appreciation of the U.S. dollar is associated with a reduction in the supply of commercial and industrial loans by U.S. banks. An increase in the broad dollar index by 2.5 points (one standard deviation) reduces U.S. banks' corporate loan originations by 10 percent....