Although credit rationing has been a stylized fact since the groundbreaking papers by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981, hereinafter S-W) and Besanko and Thakor (1987a, hereinafter B-T), Arnold and Riley (2009) note that credit rationing is unlikely in the S-W model, and Clemenz (1993) shows that it does...

This paper studies the question of the economic scale of financial institutions. We show that banks actively smooth book equity by adjusting payouts to achieve a desired trajectory of book equity. The countercyclical nature of net payouts of financial institutions leads to procyclical book...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...