For firms' business and investment decisions their access to finance is a critical determinant. In times when access to finance becomes tight, corporations face either higher capital costs or they have to postpone their investment decisions when credit lines are not prolongated. Since business...

Bank market power shapes firm investment and financing dynamics and hence affects the transmission of macroeconomic shocks. Motivated by a secular increase in the concentration of the US banking industry, I study bank market power through the lens of a dynamic general equilibrium model with...

Programs to direct finance to small firms are ubiquitous. We develop evidence of unexpected side-effects of these programs. Exploiting discontinuities in program eligibility in India’s PSL program, we show that targeted lending programs can slow growth, paradoxically creating financial...

The currency composition of investors’ funding portfolios depends on the availability and price of credit in different countries and reacts to changes in these. I extend the global multi-country model of Gabaix and Maggiori (2015) to include currency-specific interest rates to analyze the...

We acquired firm-level data from 27 post-communist economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia during 2002–08, and we estimated financial constraints’ longitudinal impacts on firms’ innovating activities. Overall, we found financial constraints to significantly impede firms’ innovation...

We highlight the role of financial constraints in contributing to persistent disparities in wealth and access to geographic opportunities across demographic groups. We document a racial leverage gap—Black borrowers have substantially higher LTV ratios at mortgage origination, reflecting...