The welfare impact of expanding access to bank accounts depends on whether accounts crowd out pre-existing financial relationships, or whether private gains from accounts are shared within social networks. To study the effect of accounts on financial linkages, we provided free bank accounts to a...

We study the provision of financial services to small firms, consumers, and workers in developing countries as part of value chain relationships: value chain microfinance (VCMF). We first explore how VCMF can both overcome barriers to financial access - including asymmetric information,...

Bank-created money, shadow-bank money, and Treasury bonds all satisfy investors' demand for a liquid transaction medium and safe store of value. We measure the quantity of these three forms of liquidity and their corresponding liquidity premium over a sample from 1934 to 2016. We empirically...

This paper studies the impact of investor composition on the sovereign debt market and the implied funding costs to borrowers. We construct an aggregate data set of sovereign debt holdings by foreign and domestic bank, non-bank private, and official investors for 95 countries over twenty years....

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

The financial crises of the last twenty years brought new economic concepts into classrooms discussions. This article introduces undergraduate students and teachers to seven of these models: (i) misallocation of capital inflows, (ii) modern and shadow banks, (iii) strategic complementarities and...

The U.S. economy has recently experienced two, seemingly unrelated, phenomena: a large increase in post-retirement life expectancy and a major expansion in securitization and shadow banking activities. We argue they are intimately related. Agents rely on financial intermediaries to save for...

We study roughly 11,000 loans from unlicensed moneylenders to over 1,000 borrowers in Singapore and provide basic information about this understudied market. Borrowers frequently expect to repay late. While lenders do rely on additional punishments to enforce loans, the primary cost of not...

Central banks provide public liquidity to traditional (regulated) banks with the intention of stabilizing the financial system. Shadow banks are not regulated, yet they indirectly access such liquidity through the interbank system. We build a model that shows how public liquidity provision may...

Is bank capital structure designed to extract deposit subsidies? We address this question by studying capital structure decisions of shadow banks: intermediaries that provide banking services but are not funded by deposits. We assemble, for the first time, call report data for shadow banks which...