The naming of eleven banks as “too big to fail (TBTF)” in 1984 led bond raters to raise their ratings on new bond issues of TBTF banks about a notch relative to those of other, unnamed banks. The relationship between bond spreads and ratings for the TBTF banks tended to flatten after that...

Payday loans are widely condemned as a “predatory debt trap.” We test that claim by researching how households in Georgia and North Carolina have fared since those states banned payday loans in May 2004 and December 2005. Compared with households in states where payday lending is permitted,...

We argue that the 2005 bankruptcy abuse reform (BAR) contributed to the surge in subprime foreclosures that followed its passage. Before BAR, over-indebted mortgagors could free up income to pay the mortgage by filing bankruptcy and having their unsecured debts discharged. BAR blocks that...

We investigate whether the 'stress test,' the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had largely...

The supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) rule recently imposed on the very largest U.S. banks has revived the question of whether banks sidestep such rules by shifting toward riskier, higher-yielding assets. Using difference-in-difference analysis, we find that, after the SLR was finalized in...

[...]Because of these concerns, this article examines the value ofthe Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey in predicting bothlending and output.1 We find that the changes in commercialcredit standards reported by loan officers are indeed linked toaggregate loan growth. Commercial lending by U.S....

[...]This paper looks for evidence of both types of crediteffects—those that are endogenous to the monetarymechanism and those that are exogenous—using informationon banks’ commercial credit standards as a proxy for bankcredit availability. We compare results from an...

[...]Our analysis of how U.S. financial market structure haschanged over the last decade produces more definitiveconclusions. Using firm-level data from a variety of sources, including data collected by central banks, we document that inaggregate, most U.S. wholesale credit and capital markets...

[...]The branch prices we study are less limited. Increasingly,banks are entering new markets by buying one or morebranches from other banks (Benz 1998). The price of a givenbranch should depend on the branch’s expected profits, andexpected profits, in turn, depend on competition. All...

We investigate whether the “stress test,” the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had largely...