This paper investigates the impact of ample liquidity provision by the European Central Bank on the functioning of the overnight unsecured interbank market from 2008 to 2014. We use novel data on interbank transactions derived from TARGET2, the main euro area payment system. To identify...

We show that negative policy rates affect the supply of bank credit in a novel way. Banks are reluctant to pass on negative rates to depositors, which increases the funding cost of high-deposit banks, and reduces their net worth, relative to low-deposit banks. As a consequence, the introduction...

We study the role of trading, and in particular market making, for the provision of stock-based incentives to managers. Market making provides liquidity as it allows trading on private information about the value of the firm. But in a liquid market the stock price does not react much to the...

We use a natural experiment in the form of 121 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states to show that tax considerations are a first-order determinant of firms' capital structure choices. Over the period 1990-2011, firms increase long-term leverage by 104 basis points on...

This paper examines the implications of leverage for corporate risk taking in a dynamic N-period model. In each period, there is an identical, standard risk-shifting problem. Leverage creates two inefficiencies. First, we confirm the standard intuition by which high leverage leads firms to take...

This paper studies how banks’ balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks’ credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank’s policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

We study how banks manage their liquidity among the various assets at their disposal. We exploit the introduction of the ECB’s two-tier system which heterogeneously reduced the cost of additional reserves holdings. We find that the treated banks increase reserve holdings by borrowing on the...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...