Rapid and large deposit outflows from banks have regained attention in the context of the March 2023 demises of Credit Suisse, SVB and other regional US banks. Moreover, the possible introduction of CBDC or a marked success of stablecoins are perceived as additional clouds over the future of...

This paper shows the existence of a central bank trilemma. When a central bank is involved in financial intermediation, either directly through a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or indirectly through other policy instruments, it can only achieve at most two of three objectives: a socially...

Though unconventional monetary policy is still new, already there is a conventional wisdom that the impact of monetary policy is related to the composition of the asset mix. This turns out to be incomplete and potentially misleading. In this paper, we find more complex effects on bank lending...

Clean water has a largely unknown economic value, particularly to small communities whose agricultural activities take place on river shores. In November 2015, the rupture of a mining tailings dam in the municipality of Mariana led to a record disposal of toxic residuals in southeast Brazil. A...

Incorporating climate change considerations in central bank decisions has been fraught with legal and technical controversies. Legal, because interpretations of central bank mandates in relation to sustainability has been widely cited as hurdles to the discussion of climate change; and technical,...

Commercial-paper backup lines account for a substantial share of undrawn loan commitments in the corporate sector, but have despite this received scant attention in the credit-line literature. In this paper, I study the liquidity-insurance properties of backup lines using a comprehensive loan-...

We estimate a structural model derived from the balance sheet identity to evaluate the effects of contagion and common exposure on banks' capital, which varies endogenously as a function of assets and liabilities. Through a regression approach inspired by the literature on structural vector...

We study the unintended effects of the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) on mortgage borrowers. Originally designed to help financially distressed borrowers refinance after the 2008-09 global financial crisis, HARP inadvertently amplified the market power of incumbent lenders by...

We use a comprehensive Swedish credit register to document that firms throughout the size distribution have access to fairly large and reasonably priced credit lines, but borrow relatively little from them. We rationalize this using a theoretical framework in which the expected cost of financial...

We exploit a nation-wide introduction of mandatory disclosure of borrowers' total credit exposures and show that sharing such information increases credit access independent of borrowers' history. Differentiating between borrowers applying to competitor banks and those reapplying to their...