We study how competition between banks and non-banks affects lending standards. Banks have private information about some borrowers and are subject to capital requirements to mitigate risk-taking incentives from deposit insurance. Non-banks are uninformed and market forces determine their...

We construct a model of a bank's optimal funding choice, where the bank negotiates with both safety-driven short-term bondholders and (mostly) risk-taking long-term bondholders. We establish that investor demands for safety create a negative relationship between the bank's capital choices and...

We examine the effects of a 2012 regulatory reform that mandated fee and performance disclosures for the investment options in 401(k) plans. We show that participants became significantly more attentive to expense ratios and short-term performance after the reform. The disclosure effects are...

This paper examines potential interactions between financial stability and the monetary policy strategies and tools considered in the Federal Reserve’s review of monetary policy strategy, tools, and communication practices. Achieving the Federal Reserve’s goals of full employment and price...

Banks add value by monitoring borrowers. High funding costs make banks reluctant to lend. A central bank can ease funding by purchasing loans, but cannot distinguish which loans require more or less monitoring, exposing it to adverse selection. A multi-tier loan pricing facility arises as the...

Operational risk models, such as the loss distribution approach, frequently use past internal losses to forecast operational loss exposure. However, the ability of past losses to predict exposure, particularly tail exposure, has not been thoroughly examined in the literature. In this paper, we...

Did government mortgage programs mitigate the adverse economic effects of the financial crisis? We find that counties with greater participation in traditional government mortgage programs experienced less severe economic downturns during the Great Recession. In particular, counties with higher...

In January 2006, federal regulators issued guidance requiring banks with specific high concentrations of commercial real estate (CRE) loans to tighten managerial controls. This paper shows that banks with concentrations in excess of the thresholds set in the guidance subsequently experienced...

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 study the evolution of US mortgage credit supply during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the mortgage market experienced a historic boom in 2020, we show there was also a large and sustained increase in intermediation markups that limited the pass-through of low rates to borrowers. Markups...