The cost of financial intermediation has declined in recent years thanks to technological progress and increased competition. I document this fact and I analyze two features of new financial technologies that have stirred controversy: returns to scale, and the use of big data and machine...

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

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...

In some markets, such as the market for drugs or for financial services, sellers have better information than buyers regarding the matching between the buyer's needs and the good's actual characteristics. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest and/or the...