We document a remarkable increase in economic belief polarization - disagreement - regarding the future state of the economy across Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. We find evidence suggesting that belief polarization may have impeded the implementation of pandemic response measures such as...

We examine changes in the corporate tax rate across the U.S. and their implications on the pricing and quantity of loans. We find an asymmetric effect on the cost of credit: loan spreads decrease by approximately 5.9 basis points in response to a one percentage tax cut, but they are insensitive...

This paper shows that local banking market conditions affect mortality rates in the United States. Exploiting the staggered relaxation of branching restrictions in the 1990s across states, we find that banking deregulation decreases local mortality rates. This effect is driven by a decrease in...

This paper proposes an early-warning bank risk measure based on the syndicate concentration of recent syndicated loans that a bank participates in. At the bank level, higher values of the measure predict greater risks (i.e., loan loss provisions, idiosyncratic return volatility, default...

Using lenders becoming members of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) as a plausible exogeneous shock, we examine whether and how lenders' commitment to transparent climate-related disclosures affects borrower firms' environmental performance. We find that client firms...

This paper studies whether and how banks' technological innovations affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. We first provide a theoretical model in which banks' technological innovation relaxes firms' earning-based bor rowing constraints and thereby enlarges the response...

This study investigates whether and how financial technologies (FinTech) influence the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. We use an interacted panel vector autoregression model to explore how the effects of monetary policy shocks change with regional-level FinTech adoption. Results...

This paper studies whether and how banks' technological innovations affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. We first provide a theoretical model in which banks' technological innovation relaxes firms' earning-based borrowing constraints and thereby enlarges the response...

We study the implications of forging stronger political ties with the US on the sensitivities of stock returns around the world to a global common factor - the global financial cycle. Using voting patterns at the United Nations as a measure of political ties with the US along with various...

We study the implications of forging stronger political ties with the US on the sensitivities of stock returns around the world to a global common factor - the global financial cycle. Using voting patterns at the United Nations as a measure of political ties with the US along with various...