We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life cycles and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms’ balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business...

In this paper we aim to find out whether bank specialization and bank capitalization affect the relationship between bank loan growth and bank capital ratio, both in expansions and in contractions. We hypothesize that the impact of bank capital on lending is relatively strong in cooperative...