Conventional wisdom in economics holds that traditional credit and insurance networks are inapt for insuring against covariate risks such as natural hazards. We challenge this claim by examining changes in financial allocations in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (Roscas), a popular...

The increasing pervasiveness of technology-driven firms that offer banking services has led to a growing pressure on traditional banks to modernize their core business activities. Banks attempt to confront the challenges of digitalization by cooperating with financial technology firms (fintechs)...

Actively managed Swedish equity mutual funds outperform the market in 1993-2001 but have negative gross and net excess returns of -0.18 and -1.47 per cent per year in 2002-2013. Across funds, there is no correlation between activism and return in the later period. Returns show little or no...

A common practice of banks has been to pool assets of different qualities and then sell a fraction of the newly created portfolios to investors. We extend the signaling model for single sales of risky assets to portfolio sales. We identify conditions under which signaling at the portfolio level...

This study finds that even small unexpected supply shocks propagate downstream through production networks and are amplified by firms with short-term financial constraints. The unexpected 2011 increase in the tax on imports purchased with foreign-sourced trade credit is examined using data...

This paper shows that monetary policy and prudential policies interact. U.S. banks issue more commercial and industrial loans to emerging market borrowers when U.S. monetary policy eases. The effect is less pronounced for banks that are more constrained through the U.S. bank stress tests,...

Developments in trade finance in 2020 were largely driven by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve years after the great financial crisis of 2008-09, the issue of trade finance re-emerged as a matter of urgency. While the current pandemic-related crisis did not have a financial cause, one...

In this paper we document and examine unusual fluctuations in the G-Fund, which is one of five funds available in a voluntary federal government employee retirement savings vehicle called the Thrift Savings Plan. The G-Fund is managed as "internally" held debt by the United States Department of...

This paper uses loan application-level data from a peer-to-peer lending platform to study the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. By employing a direct ex-ante measure of risk-taking and estimating the simultaneous equations of loan approval and loan amount, we are the first to provide...

Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...