In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many governments extended public guarantees to banks. We take advantage of a natural experiment, in which long-standing public guarantees were removed for a set of German banks following a lawsuit, to identify the real effects of these guarantees on...

We use a natural experiment and matched bank/firm data to identify the effects of bank guarantees on allocative efficiency. We find that with guarantees in place unproductive firms invest more and maintain higher rates of sales growth. Moreover, firms produce less productively. Firms also...

We identify and track over time the factors that make the financial system vulnerable to fire sales by constructing an index of aggregate vulnerability. The index starts increasing quickly in 2004, before most other major systemic risk measures, and triples by 2008. The fire-sale-specific...

This paper provides practical insights into common statistical measures used to validate a model's discriminatory power for the probability of default (PD), loss liven default (LGD) and exposure at default (EAD). The study has more of an informative value without delivering empirical evidence....

The simultaneous unwinding of leveraged positions can trigger financial market turbulence. Although balance-sheet measures of leverage are available, it is useful to construct a measure of leverage that incorporates both on- and off-balance-sheet activities. This paper provides measures of...

Today's regulatory rules, especially the easily-manipulated measures of regulatory capital, have led to costly bank failures. We design a robust regulatory system such that (i) bank losses are credibly borne by the private sector (ii) systemically important institutions cannot collapse suddenly;...

Group buying events, in which the unit price for a good or service declines with higher number of customer sign ups, are increasingly becoming popular for retailing goods and services, especially in emerging markets. This paper theoretically and empirically studies consumer equilibrium, pricing,...

We interview 361 European bank CEOs to identify their banks' main competitors. We then provide evidence on the drivers of bilateral bank competition, construct a novel competition measure at the locality level, and assess how well it explains variation in firms' credit constraints. We find that...

We interview 379 European bank CEOs to identify their banks' main competitors. We then provide evidence on the drivers of bilateral bank competition, construct a novel competition measure at the locality level, and assess how well it explains variation in firms' credit constraints. We find that...

We show empirically that public credit information increases competition in credit markets. We access data that cover all credit card borrowers in Chile and include details about relationship borrowers have with each lender. We exploit a natural experiment whereby a non-bank lender's portfolio...