The authors provide evidence that transactions accounts help financial intermediaries monitor borrowers by offering lenders a continuous stream of data on borrowers’ account balances. This information is most readily available to commercial banks, but other intermediaries, such as finance...

Superseded by the paper "Transactions accounts and loan monitoring" (Working Paper 05-14) ; Do checking accounts help banks monitor borrowers? If they do, the rationale both for allowing regulated providers of liquidity to also make risky loans to commercial borrowers and for the government's...