Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by constructing a large panel of BNPL...

We assess the impact that real time money transfer technology has on consumer outcomes, particularly during periods of financial fragility. We do this by developing a new data set that documents use of Zelle - the most widely used P2P money transfer technology in the U.S. today - constructed...

In the past two decades, cross-border portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices of a country's external assets and liabilities (i.e. "valuation effects") in affecting the country's net foreign asset...

Adverse shocks to rich countries often have a large and persistent negative impact on investment and output in developing countries. This paper examines a transmission mechanism that can account for this stylized fact. The mechanism is based on the existence of international financial frictions....

While there is a consensus that the 2008-2009 crisis was triggered by financial market disruptions in the United States, there is little agreement on whether the transmission of the crisis and the subsequent prolonged recession are due to credit factors or to a collapse of demand for goods and...

This paper provides empirical evidence for the Keynesian demand-driven propagation: initial rounds of job losses lead to additional rounds of job losses. The paper shows that U.S. counties with higher pre-existing exposure to tradable industries experienced larger job losses in non-tradable...

This paper examines resource misallocation within narrow industries in Turkey. It finds that resource misallocation in Turkey is substantial. The hypothetical gain from moving to "U.S. efficiency" is 24.5 percent of manufacturing total factor productivity in 2014. The evolution of resource...

Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey covering 6,800 firms across 43 developing countries, this paper investigates the prevalence and determinants of collateralized borrowing. It focuses on the following two aspects: (1) whether firms' loans from financial institutions require collateral (the...