Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks' reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with...

This study analyzes differences by gender in the ownership of privately held U.S. firms and examines the role of gender in the availability of credit. Using data from the nationally representative Surveys of Small Business Finances, which span a period of sixteen years, we document a series of...

The multiple payments settlement systems available in the United States differ on several dimensions. The Fedwire Funds Service, a utility that operates a U.S. large-value paymentssettlement service, offers the fastest speed of settlement. Recognizing that payments differ in the urgency with...

A large body of research has established that exporters do not fully adjust their prices across countries in response to exchange rate movements, but instead allow their markups to vary. But while markups are difficult to observe directly, we show in this paper that inventory-sales ratios...

This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and financial intermediation in the euro area. We establish stylized facts and study their stability during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Long-term interest rates have been exceptionally high and...

This paper empirically investigates banks' investment allocations over the recent business cycle. I identify unsolicited deposit shocks resulting from unconventional energy development and estimate bank allocations of these deposits. In the pre-recession period, banks lend 38 percent of...

The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is a widely used indicator of funding conditions in the interbank market. As of 2013, LIBOR underpins more than $300 trillion of financial contracts, including swaps and futures, in addition to trillions more in variable-rate mortgage and student loans....