While the Dodd Frank Act (DFA) broadens the regulatory reach to reduce systemic risks to the U.S. financial system, it does not address some important risks that could migrate to or emanate from entities outside the federal safety net. At the same time, it limits the types of interventions by...

We analyze the universe of payments settled through the Fedwire Funds Service--the primary U.S. real-time gross settlement service operated by the Federal Reserve--for the period January 2004 to December 2020. We report on trends in payments volume, payments value, balances, and overdrafts, in...

This paper reviews the theoretical literature at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance to draw lessons on the connection between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and on how monetary policy affects that connection. This literature finds that financial...

This paper reviews literature on the empirical relationship between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and how monetary policy affects that connection. Financial vulnerabilities build up over time, with both risk appetite and risk taking rising during economic...

I show how to use data from the Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States to estimate how much funding of nonfinancial businesses, households, and governments is provided by the domestic shadow banking system. I define the shadow banking system as the set of entities and activities that...

This paper examines the labor market for CEOs in the financial sector from 1988 to 2007, using a new hand-collected sample of 1,655 CEO successions. We document that there is a significant role of outside successions, as about one out of two successions involves an outside hire. In addition,...

Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely...

Can policies directed at the banking sector in one jurisdiction spill over and affect real economic activity elsewhere? To investigate this question, I exploit changes in tax rates on bank profits across U.S. states. Banks respond by reallocating small-business lending to otherwise unaffected...

This paper studies the role of banks' branching networks in propagating the oil shocks. Banks that were exposed to the oil shocks through their operations in oil-concentrated counties experienced a liquidity drainage in the form of a declining amount of demand deposit inflow as well as an...

Dramatic changes have occurred in the U.S. payment system over the past two decades, most notably an explosion in electronic card-based payments. Not surprisingly, this shift has been accompanied by a series of policy debates, all of which hinge critically on understanding consumer behavior at...