The Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) was established by the Federal Reserve to supply credit to small and, especially, midsize businesses so they could weather COVID-19-induced disruptions. This study uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data on the financial condition and overall viability of firms to...

Banks are compensated primarily through the net interest margin (NIM), which is the difference between the interest earned on their investments and the interest paid to their depositors and other creditors. In the low interest rate environment that has persisted since the Great Recession, banks...

Labor productivity (LP) in the United States has gone from being procyclical to acyclical since the mid-1980s. Using industry-level data, this paper first shows that total factor productivity (TFP), which is LP net of capital deepening, has also become much less correlated with output as well as...

The anemic pace of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation's fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on industries with different...

The measurement of bank output, a difficult and contentious issue, has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years. In this paper, we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank...

We utilize Dun & Bradstreet data on firms' financial condition to examine the allocation of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and their impact. Three main findings emerge. First, firms in better financial condition prior to the COVID outbreak were advantaged in the allocation of PPP loans....

Using supervisory data on small and mid-sized nonfinancial enterprises (SMEs), we find that those SMEs with higher leverage faced tighter constraints in accessing bank credit after the COVID-19 outbreak in spring 2020. Specifically, SMEs with higher pre-COVID leverage obtained a smaller volume...

Rather than charging direct fees, banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads. As a result, much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly. In contrast to current statistical practice, dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic...

This paper addresses the proper measurement of financial service output that is not priced explicitly. It shows how to impute nominal service output from financial intermediaries' interest income and how to construct price indices for those financial services. We present an optimizing model with...

This study analyzes how lease expirations affect the performance of commercial real estate (CRE) properties and how these patterns changed during the COVID-19 crisis. Even before the pandemic, lease expirations were associated with a notable increase in the downside risk to a property's...