Assessing the extent to which agents or firms face capital-market imperfections and quantity restrictions on credit is crucial for measuring intertemporal tradeoffs in consumption or the cost of capital for investment. In contrast to standard price-clearing, quot;full-informationquot; models of...

This paper examines micro data on U.S. firms' inventories during different macroeconomic episodes. Much of the analysis focuses on the 1981-82 recession, a recession that was apparently precipitated by tight monetary policy. We find important cross-sectional effects in this period: firms that...

We take an off-the-shelf model with financial frictions and heterogeneity, and study the mapping from a credit crunch, modeled as a shock to collateral constraints, to simple aggregate wedges. We study three variants of this model that only differ in the form of underlying heterogeneity. We find...

The intersection of research and policy on consumer credit often has a Goldilocks feel. Some researchers and policymakers posit that consumer credit markets produce too much credit. Other researchers and policymakers posit that markets produce too little credit. I review theories and evidence on...

This paper addresses how creditor protection affects the volatility of stock market prices. Credit protection reduces the probability of oscillations between binding and non-binding states of the credit constraint; thereby lowering the rate of return variance. We test this prediction of a...

Standard economic theory says that unsecured, high-interest, short-term debt — such as borrowing via credit cards and bank overdraft facilities — helps individuals smooth consumption in the event of transitory income shocks. This paper shows that — on average — individuals do not use...

This paper describes how imperfect information in both capital and labor markets can, in a context of maximizing firms and perfectly flexible prices and wages, give rise to cyclical variations in unemployment whose character closely resembles that of observed business cycles

We estimate the effect of the reduction in credit supply that followed the 2008 financial crisis on the real economy. We predict county lending shocks using variation in pre-crisis bank market shares and estimated bank supply-shifts. Counties with negative predicted shocks experienced declines...

This paper investigates the determinants of inequality in human capital with an emphasis on the role of the credit constraints. We develop and estimate a model in which individuals face uninsured human capital risks and invest in education, acquire work experience, accumulate assets and smooth...

We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel time between a bank's headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times to evaluate the impact of within bank communication...