The credit access gap experienced by minority entrepreneurs has convinced researchers that discrimination is widespread and systematic in the small business credit market. The Small Business Administration's (SBA) guaranteed lending program was designed to respond to this credit-rationing...

Since the early 1990s, credit expanded relative to income, especially after 2001. It is hypothesized that traditionally uneven credit access and gaps in the costs of credit by demographic characteristics shrank during this period. Relying on data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer...

In this speech, Paul Tucker, Executive Director for Markets and Monetary Policy Committee member, sets out some thoughts on why money and credit matter for monetary policy making. Though particularly relevant given the current turmoil in banking and capital markets, and in understanding his...

We extend the literature on budget deficits and interest rates in three ways: we examine both advanced and emerging economies and for the first time a large emerging market panel; explore interactions to explain some of the heterogeneity in the literature; and apply system GMM. There is overall a...

We explore the inter-temporal effects of the pool externalities caused by imperfect screening in competitive credit markets. We find that imperfect screening may, depending on the parameters of the model, generate excessive screening, inefficient duplication of screening or screening cycles....

The recent global financial crisis has intensified calls to make the financial sector less crisis-prone, and to this end to make impairment recognition rules for debt instruments more forward looking. To better understand the behavior of different impairment rules and their potential effect on...

Public procurement accounts for one third of government spending. In this paper, I document a new mechanism through which government procurement promotes firm growth: firms use procurement contracts to increase the amount of cash-flow based lending. I use Portuguese administrative data over...

We elicit consumer perceptions about the interest rate associated with credit-card borrowing. Combining bank account data and surveys, we find that consumers have very noisy perceptions about the true interest costs associated with credit card debt. Total borrowing decreases with perceived...

Using unique household survey data from Ecuador, we study how an increase in poor households' income affects their probability of borrowing from local loan sharks ("chulqueros"). We exploit a natural experiment created by a government cash transfer program for which only households with a...