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...

Small businesses (SMEs) depend on banks for credit. We show that the severity of the Eurozone crisis was worse in countries where firms borrowed more from domestic banks ("domestic bank dependence") than in countries where firms borrowed more from international banks. Eurozone banking...

We exploit the outset of a regulation seeking to improve judicial efficiency through the rearrangement of courts’ geography in Italy to provide causal evidence on the relationship between judiciary structural reforms and banks financial stability. To this end, we apply a...

A standard result in contests is that a higher-ability player has a higher probability of winning the prize than a lower-ability player. Put differently, a stronger player has an advantage over a weaker player in a contest. There are very few exceptions to this standard result. I consider a...

Measuring and identifying financial constraints represents an important challenge in empirical studies. Due to data limitations perception-based indicators or approximations of access to finance by the usage of finance are often used, disregarding firm-specific differences in the demand for...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

How does uncertainty affect the costs of raising finance in the bond market and via bank loans? Empirically, this paper finds that heightened uncertainty is accompanied by an increase in corporate bond yields and a decrease in bank lending rates. This finding can be explained with a model that...

This paper examines the impact of the recent global financial crisis on the cost of debt capital (syndicated loans) in a leading emerging market, namely China, using difference-in-differences and GARCH approaches. Before the crisis China adopted banking reforms allowing entry of foreign banks...

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,...