The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight- money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and external funds-- enhances the effects of...

In 2011, Colombia instituted a tax on repayment of bank loans, thereby increasing the cost of short-term bank credit more than long-term credit. Firms responded by cutting their short-term loans for liquidity management purposes and increasing their use of cash and trade credit. In industries...

Economic growth is persistently low following a financial crisis, possibly because of a continuing weal banking system. In a financial crisis bank health is significantly damaged. Post-crisis regulatory changes have aimed at restoring bank health, but measuring bank health by Tobin's Q, we find...

We document the importance of covenant violations in transmitting bank health to non-financial firms using a new supervisory data set of bank loans. Roughly one-third of loans in our data breach a covenant during the 2008-09 period, providing lenders the opportunity to force a renegotiation of...

House prices and exchange rates can potentially amplify the expansionary effect of capital inflows by inflating the value of collateral. We first set up a model of collateralized borrowing in domestic and foreign currency with international financial intermediation in which a change in leverage...

A growing literature shows that credit indicators forecast aggregate real outcomes. While researchers have proposed various explanations, the economic mechanism behind these results remains an open question. In this paper, we show that a simple, frictionless, model explains empirical findings...

The sensitivity of the main global liquidity components, international loan and bond flows, to global factors varied considerably over the past decade. The estimated sensitivity to US monetary policy rose substantially in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, peaked around the...

Credit market freezes in which debt issuance declines dramatically and market liquidity evaporates are typically observed during financial crises. In the financial crisis of 2008-09, the structured credit market froze, issuance of corporate bonds declined, and secondary credit markets became...

We document the fact that servicers have been reluctant to renegotiate mortgages since the foreclosure crisis started in 2007, having performed payment reducing modifications on only about 3 percent of seriously delinquent loans. We show that this reluctance does not result from securization:...

We develop a new identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the geographic expansion of bank holding company (BHC) assets across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on BHC risk. We find that the geographic expansion of bank assets reduces risk. Moreover, geographic expansion...