We reconsider the role of financial intermediaries in monetary economics, and explore the hypothesis that the financial intermediary sector is the engine that drives the financial cycle through fluctuations in the price of risk. In this framework, balance sheet quantities emerge as a key...

This paper presents a theoretical framework to understand the impact of foreign bank entry on the access to and the price of credit for different types of firms. A major point of departure from the previous literature is that incumbents' information about firms is endogenous in the model;...

How do developments at lending institutions that alter the way they grant and monitor loans influence their borrowers' financial reporting quality (FRQ)? We examine this question by investigating the influence that privatizations of Chinese state banks (CSBs) had on the quality of their...

I study the impact of the expansion in a national-level directed lending program aimed at increasing institutional credit access of small firms in India. In 2006, the Government of India changed the criterion determining the small status of firms, thereby expanding the pool of small firms...

Even as banks have decreased their exposure to residential mortgage loans since 2008, bank exposure to leveraged lending has risen dramatically. The $1 trillion total asset leveraged loan market poses a significant and growing source of credit risk to U.S. depository institutions and investors....

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly under-examined, given the...

We document that banks which cut lending the most during the Great Recession were lending to the riskiest firms. Motivated by this evidence, we build a competitive matching model of bank-firm relationship, in which firms with riskier projects borrow from the banks with lower holding costs (e.g....

How do banks transmit long-term central bank liquidity injections to borrowers? We exploit unique variation in how the ECB's 2011-12 Long-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs) affected lending to firms discontinuously across credit ratings (within banks) to make four contributions. (i) We show the...

Social capital is a key factor affecting the functioning of financial markets (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2004). However, the estimation of the effect of social capital on credit markets is notoriously difficult. In this paper we exploit the recent Lehman Brothers crisis and a rich dataset to...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly underexamined, given the...