The anemic pace of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation's fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on industries with different...

Labor productivity (LP) in the United States has gone from being procyclical to acyclical since the mid-1980s. Using industry-level data, this paper first shows that total factor productivity (TFP), which is LP net of capital deepening, has also become much less correlated with output as well as...

Banks are compensated primarily through the net interest margin (NIM), which is the difference between the interest earned on their investments and the interest paid to their depositors and other creditors. In the low interest rate environment that has persisted since the Great Recession, banks...

The Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) was established by the Federal Reserve to supply credit to small and, especially, midsize businesses so they could weather COVID-19-induced disruptions. This study uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data on the financial condition and overall viability of firms to...

FinTech online lending to consumers has grown rapidly in the post-crisis era. As argued by its advocates, one key advantage of FinTech lending is that lenders can predict loan outcomes more accurately by employing complex analytical tools, such as machine learning (ML) methods. This study...

Using supervisory data on small and mid-sized nonfinancial enterprises (SMEs), we find that those SMEs with higher leverage faced tighter constraints in accessing bank credit after the COVID-19 outbreak in spring 2020. Specifically, SMEs with higher pre-COVID leverage obtained a smaller volume...

The Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) was established by the Federal Reserve to supply credit to small and, especially, midsize businesses so they could weather COVID-19-induced disruptions. This study uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data on the financial condition and overall viability of firms to...

This study explores the mechanisms explaining the large, persistent effect of the 10-day funding delay in the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) on employment recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic, as estimated by Doniger and Kay (2021). We find that the top 1 percent of urban counties by...

We utilize Dun & Bradstreet data on firms' financial condition to examine the allocation of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and their impact. Three main findings emerge. First, firms in better financial condition prior to the COVID outbreak were advantaged in the allocation of PPP loans....

This study analyzes how lease expirations affect the performance of commercial real estate (CRE) properties and how these patterns changed during the COVID-19 crisis. Even before the pandemic, lease expirations were associated with a notable increase in the downside risk to a property's...