Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

This paper exploits the federal preemption of national banks in 2004 from local laws against predatory lending to gauge the effect of the supply of credit on the real economy. First, the preemption regulation resulted in an 11% increase in annual lending in the 2004-2006 period, which is...

Safe assets play a critical role in an(y) economy. A “safe asset” is an asset that is (almost always) valued at face value without expensive and prolonged analysis. That is, by design there is no benefit to producing (private) information about its value. And this is common knowledge....