The Uniform Small Loan Law (USLL) was the Russell Sage Foundation’s primary device for fighting what it viewed as the scourge of high-rate lending to poor people in the first half of the twentieth century. The USLL created a new class of lenders who could make small loans at interest rates...

This paper examines the mechanism through which banking sector distress affects the availability of credit. We use the experience of the United States during the Great Depression, a period of intense bank distress, to conduct our analysis. We utilize previously neglected data from a 1934 survey...

This paper examines the mechanism through which banking sector distress affects the availability of credit. We use the experience of the United States during the Great Depression, a period of intense bank distress, to conduct our analysis. We utilize previously neglected data from a 1934 survey...

Reducing systemic liquidity risk related to seasonal swings in loan demand was one reason for the founding of the Federal Reserve System. Existing evidence on the post-Federal Reserve increase in the seasonal volatility of aggregate lending and the decrease in seasonal interest rate swings...

Reducing systemic liquidity risk related to seasonal swings in loan demand was one reason for the founding of the Federal Reserve System. Existing evidence on the post-Federal Reserve increase in the seasonal volatility of aggregate lending and the decrease in seasonal interest rate swings...

The Great Depression is infamous for banking panics, which were a symptomatic of a phenomenon that scholars have labeled a contagion of fear. Using geocoded, microdata on bank distress, we develop metrics that illuminate the incidence of these events and how banks that remained in operation...

Credit score cutoff rules result in very similar potential borrowers being treated differently by mortgage lenders. Recent research has used variation induced by these rules to investigate the connection between securitization and lender moral hazard in the recent financial crisis. However, the...

Banks and other financial institutions which were too-big-to-fail (TBTF) played a central role during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. The present article lays out how misguided policies enabled banks to grow both in size as well as in complexity and therefore acquire TBTF status,...

This Article critically examines the transformation of the financial services industry during and since the Financial Crisis of 2007–2009. This transformation has been marked by the demise of the major investment banks and the related rise of a set of powerful players known as private equity...

This article explains the roots of financial crises in one of the oldest and most fundamental problems of commercial law: hidden leverage. Common law courts wrestled with this problem for centuries and developed a time – tested solution: the doctrine of secret liens. If the debtor becomes...