"The pattern of disagreement between bond raters suggests that bank and insurance firms are inherently more opaque than other firms. Moody's and Standard and Poor's split more frequently over these financial intermediaries, and the splits are more lopsided, as theory here predicts. Uncertainty...

[...]This paper looks for evidence of both types of crediteffects—those that are endogenous to the monetarymechanism and those that are exogenous—using informationon banks’ commercial credit standards as a proxy for bankcredit availability. We compare results from an...

[...]Our analysis of how U.S. financial market structure haschanged over the last decade produces more definitiveconclusions. Using firm-level data from a variety of sources, including data collected by central banks, we document that inaggregate, most U.S. wholesale credit and capital markets...

[...]The branch prices we study are less limited. Increasingly,banks are entering new markets by buying one or morebranches from other banks (Benz 1998). The price of a givenbranch should depend on the branch’s expected profits, andexpected profits, in turn, depend on competition. All...

[...]Because of these concerns, this article examines the value ofthe Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey in predicting bothlending and output.1 We find that the changes in commercialcredit standards reported by loan officers are indeed linked toaggregate loan growth. Commercial lending by U.S....