"Policymakers and economists disagree about the impact of bank regulations on the distribution of income. Exploiting cross-state and cross-time variation, we test whether liberalizing restrictions on intra-state branching in the United States intensified, ameliorated, or had no effect on income...

By studying intrastate branch banking reform in the United States, this paper provides evidence that financial markets substantively influence the distribution of income. From the 1970s through the 1990s, most states removed restrictions on intrastate branching, which intensified bank...

Does the pre-deal geographic overlap of the subsidiaries and branches of two banks affect the probability that they merge and post-merger value creation and synergies? We compile comprehensive information on U.S. bank acquisitions from 1986 through 2014, construct several measures of network...

Although policymakers often discuss tradeoffs between bank competition and stability, past research provides differing theoretical perspectives and empirical results on the impact of competition on risk. In this paper, we employ a new approach for identifying exogenous changes in the competitive...

We develop a new identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the geographic expansion of bank holding company (BHC) assets across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on BHC risk. We find that the geographic expansion of bank assets reduces risk. Moreover, geographic expansion...

Banking reforms--that reduced interest rates--boosted college enrollment rates among able students from middle class families. We define "able" students as those with learning aptitude scores in the top two-thirds of the U.S. population. We define "middle class" as families in which both parents...