The 2007 Property Law in China checked the power of local governments to expropriate the assets of private firms and it gave creditors (primarily banks) more rights over the assets underlying their secured loans to private firms. We use the property law as a natural experiment for understanding...

Although policymakers often discuss tradeoffs between bank competition and stability, past research provides differing theoretical perspectives and empirical results on the impact of competition on risk. In this paper, we employ a new approach for identifying exogenous changes in the competitive...

Did regulatory reforms that lowered barriers to competition among U.S. banks increase or decrease the quality of information that banks disclose to the public and regulators? We find that an intensification of competition reduced abnormal accruals of loan loss provisions and the frequency with...

Why did banks experience massive deposit inflows during the first months of the pandemic? Using weekly branch-level data on interest rates and county-level data on COVID-19 cases, we discover that interest rates at bank branches in counties with higher COVID-19 infection rates fell by more than...

“Everybody talks about financial innovation, but (almost) nobody empirically tests hypotheses about it” Frame and White (2004).The financial turmoil from 2007 onwards has spurred renewed debates on the “bright” and “dark” sides of financial innovation. Using bank-, industry- and...

“Everybody talks about financial innovation, but (almost) nobody empirically tests hypotheses about it”. Frame and White (2004)The financial turmoil from 2007 onwards has spurred renewed debates on the “bright” and “dark” sides of financial innovation. Using bank-, industry- and...