A large-scale microcredit expansion program---together with a credit bureau accessible to all lenders---can enable unbanked borrowers to build a credit history, facilitating their transition to commercial banks. Loan-level data from Rwanda show the program improved access to credit and reduced...

What are the implications of information technology (IT) in banking for financial stability? Data on US banks' IT equipment and the background of their executives reveals that higher pre-crisis IT adoption led to fewer non-performing loans and more lending during the global financial crisis....

Focusing on downgrades as stress events that drive the selling of corporate bonds, we document that the illiquidity of stressed bonds has increased after the Volcker Rule. Dealers regulated by the Rule have decreased their market-making activities while non-Volcker-affected dealers have stepped...

We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks' marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S....

We find that firm-level variance risk premium, estimated as the difference between option-implied and expected variances, has a prominent explanatory power for credit spreads in the presence of market- and firm-level risk control variables identified in the existing literature. Such a...

While uncovered interest parity (UIP) fails unconditionally, UIP conditional on monetary policy actions remains a cornerstone of macroeconomic models used for monetary policy analysis. We posit that monetary policy actions are partially revealed by FOMC statements and propose a new...

Monetary policy actions since 2008 have influenced long-term interest rates through forward guidance and quantitative easing - both "unconventional" strategies. We examine whether the effect of such actions on Treasury yields have passed through to private yields to a degree comparable to...

Monetary policy actions since 2008 have influenced long-term interest rates through forward guidance and quantitative easing. We propose a strategy to identify the comovement between interest rate and equity price movements induced by monetary policy when an observable representing policy...

Revenues generated from the sales of consolidated data represent a substantial source of income for U.S. stock exchanges. Until 2007, consolidated data revenue was allocated in proportion to the number of reported trades. This allocation rule encouraged market participants to break up large...

Many U.S. corporations have frozen defined benefit (DB) pension plans, replacing new DB promises with contributions to defined contribution (DC) plans. We estimate expected DB accruals from the age-service and salary distributions of a large sample of U.S. corporate pension plans with more than...