U.S. banks obtain most of their funding from a combination of zero-interest deposits and interest-bearing deposits. Using local demographic variations as instruments for banks' liability composition, I show that when monetary policy tightens, banks with a larger proportion of zero-interest...

Originally, U.S. savings banks were owned by their depositors. In recent decades, many savings banks have “demutualized”, by converting from customer to investor ownership. We examine the implications of such events for depositor welfare. We introduce a random coefficients logit model of...

This paper studies whether credit ratings can alleviate the hold-up problem between small opaque firms and informed banks. We exploit a refinement of the rating information produced by a state-owned rating agency and available to all lenders, which causes some firms to receive a positive rating...

We analyze how public information on past entrepreneurial failure affects entrepreneurs' ability to borrow and start new ventures. We exploit a policy shock from 2013 in France, which eliminated a widely used means of public reporting to banks of the identity of entrepreneurs involved in past...

Negative interest rate policy makes excess liquidity costly to hold for banks and this may weaken the bank-based transmission of monetary policy. We design a rule-based tiering system for excess reserve remuneration that reduces the burden of negative rates on banks while ensuring that the...

Using microdata from France, we provide novel evidence that salience shapes banks’ lending decisions. Information about borrowers’ payment defaults on trade bills is publicly available to all banks, but it appears more prominently to the bank managing the payment transaction (i.e., the...

This paper studies whether greater competition can mitigate agency problems within banks. We measure the intensity of the agency conflict within a bank by the volume of loans that the bank lends to its insiders (e.g., executives). We first check that these loans are a form of private benefit. By...