The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about the governance of banks. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing board governance using a sample of banking firm data that spans forty years. We examine the relationship between board structure (size and...

Using a novel database containing the time-series details of the organizational structure of individual bank holding companies, this paper presents the first population-wide study of the transformation in business scope of U.S. banks. Expanding scope has a negative impact on performance on...

The decentralized nature of blockchain markets has given rise to a complex and highly heterogeneous market structure, gaining increasing importance as traditional and decentralized (DeFi) finance become more interconnected. This paper introduces the DeFi intermediation chain and provides...

Does the intensity of supervision affect quantifiable outcomes at supervised firms? We develop a novel proxy to identify plausibly exogenous variation in the intensity of supervision across large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), based on the size rank of a BHC within its Federal Reserve...

We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model that distinguishes supervision from regulation and a novel dataset on work hours of Federal Reserve supervisors. We highlight the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of supervision and use the model to interpret the relationship...

We measure bank supervision using the database of supervisory issues, known as matters requiring attention or immediate attention, raised by Federal Reserve examiners to banking organizations. The volume of supervisory issues increases with banks' asset size, especially for the largest and most...

The policy measures taken since the financial crisis have greatly expanded the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and have thus raised the level of aggregate bank reserves as well. Over the same period there has been a significant shift in the timing of payments made over the Federal...

Borrowers' housing equity is an important component of their wealth and a critical determinant of their vulnerability to shocks. In this paper, we create a unique data set that allows us to provide a comprehensive look at the ratio of housing debt to housing values - what we refer to as...

We argue that the time-varying regional distribution of housing equity influences the aggregate consequences of monetary policy through its effects on mortgage refinancing. Using detailed loan-level data, we show that regional differences in housing equity affect refinancing and spending...

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...