We use bank-firm matched data to study how the capital buffers that large U.S. banks must satisfy to “pass” the Federal Reserve’s stress tests impact banks’ lending and firms’ loan volumes, overall debt, investment, and employment. We find that larger stress-test capital buffers lead...

Did banks curb lending to creditworthy small and mid-sized enterprises (SME) during the COVID-19 pandemic? Sitting on top of minimum capital requirements, regulatory capital buffers introduced after the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) are costly regions of "rainy day" equity capital designed...

We consider the effect of hedging with foreign currency derivatives on Brazilian firms in the period 1997 through 2004, a period that includes the Brazilian currency crisis of 1999. We find that, derivative users have valuations that are higher than non-user firms. Hedging with currency...

Domestic prudential regulation can have unintended effects across borders and may be less effective in an environment where banks operate globally. Using U.S. micro-banking data for the first quarter of 2000 through the third quarter of 2013, this study shows that some regulatory changes indeed...