We examine the ability of policymakers to stimulate household borrowing and spending during the Great Recession by reducing banks' cost of funds. Using panel data on 8.5 million U.S. credit card accounts and 743 credit limit regression discontinuities, we estimate the marginal propensity to...

We propose a new approach to studying the pass-through of credit expansion policies that focuses on frictions, such as asymmetric information, that arise in the interaction between banks and borrowers. We decompose the effect of changes in banks' cost of funds on aggregate borrowing into the...

We examine the impact on a firm when it is exogenously forced to switch its bank relationship from one branch to another branch of the same bank. We show the effect depends directly on the relative balance between the hard accounting information provided to the bank by the firm, as part of the...