I provide a quantitative interpretation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years. Measuring separately the cost of intermediation and the production of financial services, I find that: (i) the quantity of intermediation varies a lot over time; (ii) intermediation is...

The paper provides an overview of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance. The discussion lays out potential benefits and challenges of the new system and presents a comparison to the traditional system of financial intermediation. Our analysis highlights that while the DeFi architecture...

This paper makes three points regarding the proper measurement of the output of financial intermediaries. Two of them concern the measurement of nominal financial output, especially banking output. First, we show that, to impute the nominal value of implicitly priced financial output, it is...

This paper assesses the potential impact of FinTech on the finance industry, focusing on financial stability and access to services. I document first that financial services remain surprisingly expensive, which explains the emergence of new entrants. I then argue that the current regulatory...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to examine the role of information technology when intermediaries facilitate the origination and distribution of assets given information asymmetry. Information technology measures the informativeness of asset-quality signals received by...

We consider a firm with infrequent access to capital markets, continuous access to financing by a risk-averse intermediary, and a cost of holding cash. The intermediary absorbs a fraction of cash-flow risk that decreases with the firm's liquidity reserves and acquires a stake in the firm under...