Can local government spending spur entrepreneurial activity? To answer this question we study a setting where, around multiple pre-determined and non-manipulable thresholds, municipalities with lower tax revenues receive direct and different monetary grants from the national budget. Employing a...

We exploit exogenous legislative changes that alter the priority structure of different classes of debt to study how debtholder monitoring incentives affect bank earnings opacity. We present novel evidence that exposing nondepositors to greater losses in bankruptcy reduces bank earnings opacity,...

We examine the role of private deposit insurance for deposit flows, bank lending, and moral hazard during a financial crisis. We present novel evidence that banks headquartered in Massachusetts whose deposits are federally and privately insured obtain more deposits, expand lending, and originate...

We examine how financial technology affects household hardship in terms of personal bankruptcy. We exploit an exogenous source of variation in marketplace lending, a court verdict rendering above-usury loans issued by banks to Connecticut and New York residents null and void if the loans are...

We examine how debt priority structure affects bank funding costs and soundness. Leveraging an unexplored natural experiment that changes the priority of claims on banks' assets, we document asymmetric effects that are consistent with changes in monitoring intensity by various creditors...

We present a novel way to examine macro-financial linkages by focusing on the real effects of bank supervisors' enforcement actions. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in supervisory monitoring intensity, we show that enforcement actions in single-market banks trigger temporarily large...