This paper examines the effectiveness of Japans Emergency Credit Guarantee (ECG) program set up during the financial turmoil following the failure of Lehman Brothers, in increasing credit availability and improving the ex-post performance of small businesses. In particular, using a unique...

In September 2008, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into conservatorship and dividend payments on common and preferred shares were suspended. As a result, share prices fell to nearly zero and many banks across the country lost the value of their...

Using weekly confidential data from U.S. banks, we document an unprecedented flight to safety of deposits from regional banks towards large banks in the early 2023. We show that large banks experienced large deposit inflows relative to small and regional banks and that these differences remain...

When designing schemes to help SMEs survive crises, the government typically faces asymmetric information, so that it cannot target the SMEs most worth saving. We show that the government can exploit the information in the borrower loan demand to improve policy targets compared with existing...

Financial reform must not ignore the interests of small stakeholders – who must be regarded as too small to be counted. Making equity an explicit objective is delicate: it needs to be calibrated such that the vulnerable are not exposed to further risks. Policies outside the realm of financial...

We show that the effect of diversification on systemic risk exposures varies with bank size and a country's institutional setting. Non-interest income reduces large banks' systemic risk exposures, whereas it increases that of small banks. However, exploiting heterogeneity in countries'...

Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-à-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times...

We examine whether financial stress at larger banks has a different impact on the real economy than financial stress at smaller banks. Our empirical results show that stress experienced by banks in the top 1 percent of the size distribution leads to a statistically significant and negative...

We examine sources of systemic risk (threshold size, complexity, and interconnectedness) with factors constructed from equity returns of large financial firms, after accounting for standard risk factors. From the factor loadings and factor returns, we estimate the implicit government subsidy for...

The aim of the paper is to analyse how credit crunch has modified the traditional bank-firm relationship with a particular attention to the Italian situation. Our analysis reinforces the finding that in Italy, the credit available to the real economy is insufficient in terms not only of quantity...