I study the effects of credit tightening in an economy with uninsured idiosyncratic investment risk. In the model, entrepreneurs require an equity premium because collateral constraints limit insurance. After collateral constraints tighten, the equity premium and the riskiness of consumption...

This paper examines the relationship between multimarket bank presence and the profitability (and therefore viability) of small, single-market banks. We find that increased presence of multimarket banks is associated with a significant reduction in the profitability of small, single-market banks...

In this paper, we examine the role of market characteristics in explaining the much discussed phenomenon of growth in the number of banking institution branches over time, and the much less discussed phenomenon of decline in the size of the average branch. We note first that substitution of bank...

Theory predicts that "common ownership" (ownership of rivals by a common shareholder) can be anticompetitive because it reduces the weight firms place on their own profits and shifts weight toward rival firms held by common shareholders. In this paper we use accounting data from the banking...

If managers maximize the payoffs of their shareholders rather than firm profits, then it may be anticompetitive for a shareholder to own competing firms. This is because a manager?s objective function may place weight on profits of competitors who are held by the same shareholder. Recent...

We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks in the context of their co-existence with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe "money-like" claims, they go about this in very different ways. Traditional banks create safe claims with a combination of costly...

Households who wish to extract home equity through refinancing their mortgage face a hidden transaction cost. The real value of the fixed nominal mortgage payment declines over time with inflation. The change in the real value of the mortgage payments from taking on a new mortgage is positive...

We construct a model of a bank's optimal funding choice, where the bank negotiates with both safety-driven short-term bondholders and (mostly) risk-taking long-term bondholders. We establish that investor demands for safety create a negative relationship between the bank's capital choices and...

To attract retail time deposits, over 7,000 FDIC insured U.S. commercial banks publicly post their yield offers. I document an economically sizable and highly pro-cyclical cross-sectional dispersion in these yield offers during the period 1997-2011. Banks adjusted their yields rigidly and...

We examine explanations for the secular decline in interstate migration since the 1980s. After showing that demographic and socioeconomic factors can account for little of this decrease, we present evidence suggesting that it is related to a downward trend in labor market transitions -- i.e. a...