We study the effect of Department of Justice lawsuits in the 2010s against large lenders for alleged fraud in the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program. The suits led to more than $5 billion in settlements and caused targeted banks and their peers to precipitously exit...

We make use of Shared National Credit Program (SNC) data to examine syndicated loans in which the lead arranger retains no stake. We find that the lead arranger sells its entire loan share for 27 percent of term loans and 48 percent of Term B loans, typically shortly after syndication. In...

Monitoring is one of the main activities explaining the existence of banks, yet empirical evidence about its effect on loan outcomes is scant. Using granular loan-level information from the Italian Credit Register, we build a novel measure of bank monitoring based on banks' requests for...

The coronavirus outbreak raises the question of how central bank liquidity support affects financial stability and promotes economic recovery. Using newly assembled data on cross-county flu mortality rates and state-charter bank balance sheets in New York State, we investigate the effects of the...

Analyzing unique data on loan applications by individuals who are majority owners of small firms, we detail how a bank's credit decisions affect their future income. We use the bank's cutoff rule, which is based on the applicants' credit scores, as the discontinuous locus providing exogenous...

Agency mortgage backed securities (MBS) with diverse characteristics are traded in parallel with individualized contracts in the specified pool (SP) market and with standardized contracts in the to-be-announced (TBA) market. We find that this unique parallel trading environment significantly...

We document the propagation effects through supply chains of the most damaging cyberattack in history and the important role of banks in mitigating its impact. Customers of directly hit firms saw reductions in revenues, profitability, and trade credit relative to similar firms. The losses were...

We study the relationship between bank capital ratios and the distribution of future real GDP growth. Growth in the aggregate bank capital ratio corresponds to a smaller left tail of GDP - smaller crisis probability - but at the cost of a smaller right tail of growth outcomes - smaller...

We show that "zombie credit" - cheap credit to impaired firms - has a disinflationary effect. By helping distressed firms to stay afloat, such credit creates excess production capacity, thereby putting downward pressure on product prices. Granular European data on inflation, firms, and banks...

A surprisingly neglected facet of sector evolution is the evolutionary analysis of firms', and thus a sector's, scope. Defining a sector as a group of firms that can change their scope over time, we study the transformation of U.S. banking firms. We undertake a sectoral, population-wide study of...