This paper finds that banks and non-banks respond differently to increased competition in consumer credit markets. Increased competition and the greater threat of failure induces banks to specialize more in relationship business lending, and surviving banks are more profitable. However,...

Using new employer-employee matched data, this paper investigates the impact of uncertainty, as measured by idiosyncratic stock market volatility, on individual outcomes. We find that firms provide at best partial insurance to their workers. An increase in firm-level uncertainty is associated...

Economists have argued that a high concentration of land holdings in a country can create powerful interest groups that retard the creation of economic institutions, and thus hold back economic development. Could these arguments apply beyond underdeveloped countries with backward political...

Landed elites in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century played a significant role in restricting the development of finance. States that had higher land concentration passed more restrictive banking legislation. At the county level, counties with very concentrated land...

Illiquidity in short-term credit markets during the financial crisis might have severely curtailed the supply of non-bank consumer credit. Using a new data set linking every car sold in the United States to the credit supplier involved in each transaction, we find that the collapse of the...

Does credit availability exacerbate asset price inflation? What channels could it work through? What are the long run consequences? In this paper we address these questions by examining the farm land price boom (and bust) in the United States that preceded the Great Depression. We find that...

The McFadden Act of 1927 was one of the most hotly contested pieces of legislation in U.S. banking history, and its influence was still felt over half a century later. The act was intended to force states to accord the same branching rights to national banks as they accorded to state banks. By...

We study how the availability of credit shapes adaptation to a climatic shock, specifically, the long 1950s US drought. We find that bank lending, net immigration, and population growth decline sharply in drought exposed areas with limited initial access to bank finance. In contrast,...