Can allowing foreign participation in the banking sector increase real output, despite the imperfectly competitive nature of the industry? Using a new model of heterogeneous, imperfectly competitive lenders and a simple search process, we show how endogenous markups (the net interest margin...

The recent banking crisis highlights the challenges faced in credit intermediation. New online peer-to-peer lending markets offer opportunities to examine lending models that primarily cater to small borrowers and that generate more types of information on which to screen. This paper evaluates...

The hypothesis that financial markets punish traders who make relatively inaccurate forecasts and eventually eliminate the effect of their beliefs on prices is of fundamental importance to the standard modeling paradigm in asset pricing. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for...

The distance between small firms and their lenders in the United States is increasing. Not only are firms choosing more distant lenders, they are also communicating with them in more impersonal ways. After documenting these systematic changes, we demonstrate that they do not stem from small...

Was the $278 billion reboot of the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in early 2021 disbursed equitably to minority communities? This paper provides the first analysis of how PPP funds were disbursed to minority communities in the third and final round of the program, which was...

Using confidential regulatory firm-bank-loan level data from the U.S., we document four new facts about the credit market. First, private SMEs typically utilize all available bank credit which comprises their entire balance sheet debt, compared to large listed firms who can switch between...

We explore the sources of racial disparities in small business lending by studying the $806 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was designed to support small business jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. PPP loans were administered by private lenders but federally guaranteed, largely...

This paper argues that rental market interactions allow small firms to increase their effective scale and mechanize production, even when each individual firm would be too small to invest in expensive machines. We conduct a novel survey of manufacturing firms in Uganda, which uncovers an active...