In this paper, we introduce a model to study the interaction between insurance and banking. We build on the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980, which significantly expanded and restructured the decades-old federal crop insurance program and adverse weather shocks - over-exposure of crops to heat...

Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate...

Weather is a key source of income risk, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial involving a sample of Indian farmers to study how an innovative rainfall insurance product affects production decisions. We find that insurance provision induces...

Productive firms can access credit markets directly by issuing corporate bonds or by borrowing through financial intermediaries. In this paper, we study the cyclical properties of corporate credit provision through these two types of debt instruments in major advanced economies. We argue that...

We show that insurance companies have almost nonupled their investments in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) in the post-crisis period, reaching total holdings of $125 billion in 2019. The growth in CLOs' investments has far outpaced that of loans and corporate bonds, and was characterized...

Using data on balance sheets of both financial and nonfinancial sectors of the economy, we use a "demand system" approach to study how lender composition and willingness to provide credit affect the relationship between credit expansions and real activity. A key advantage of jointly modeling the...

I consider changes in labor markets across U.S. states and counties around the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and its implementation in 2014. I find that counties with large fractions of uninsured (and therefore a large exposure to the ACA) before the enactment or the...

As COVID-19 has spread across the globe, several observers noticed that countries still administering an old vaccine against tuberculosis-the BCG vaccine-have had fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita in the early stages of the outbreak. This paper uses a geographic regression discontinuity...

Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. Relevant covariates change continuously across...