Platform intermediation of goods and services has considerably transformed the U.S. economy. We use administrative data on U.S. tax returns to study the role of the gig economy on entrepreneurship. We find that gig workers are more likely to become entrepreneurs, particularly those who are lower...

We examine how the political ideology of corporate leaders shapes cross-border firm networks. Exploiting changes in ideological alignment between U.S. firm CEOs and foreign governments around close foreign elections, we show that U.S. firms are more likely to terminate trade relationships with...

We review an empirical literature that studies how political polarization affects financial decisions. We first discuss the degree of partisan segregation in finance and corporate America, the mechanisms through which partisanship may influence financial decisions, and available data sources to...

Building on the work of Jiang et al. (2023) we develop a framework to analyze the effects of credit risk on the solvency of U.S. banks in the rising interest rate environment. We focus on commercial real estate (CRE) loans that account for about quarter of assets for an average bank and about...

In the face of rising interest rates in 2022, banks mitigated interest rate exposure of the accounting value of their assets but left the vast majority of their long-duration assets exposed to interest rate risk. Data from call reports and SEC filings shows that only 6% of U.S. banking assets...

While reliance on human discretion is a pervasive feature of institutional design, human discretion can also introduce costly noise (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein 2021). We evaluate the consequences, determinants, and trade-offs associated with discretion in high-stake decisions assessing bank...

Existing macroeconomic models focused on bank balance sheet lending are deficient because they do not account for the modern industrial organization of financial intermediation. Utilizing publicly available micro-level lending data, we investigate two increasingly significant margins of...

We analyze U.S. banks' asset exposure to a recent rise in the interest rates with implications for financial stability. The U.S. banking system's market value of assets is $2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of assets accounting for loan portfolios held to maturity....