Central bank balance sheet expansion is financed by commercial banks. It involves not just a substitution of liquid central bank reserves for other assets held by commercial banks, but also a counterpart alteration in commercial bank liabilities, such as in short-term deposits issued to finance...

We study how the availability of credit shapes adaptation to a climatic shock, specifically, the long 1950s US drought. We find that bank lending, net immigration, and population growth decline sharply in drought exposed areas with limited initial access to bank finance. In contrast,...

When the Federal Reserve (Fed) expanded its balance sheet via quantitative easing (QE), commercial banks financed reserve holdings with deposits and reduced their average maturity. They also issued lines of credit to corporations. However, when the Fed halted its balance-sheet expansion in 2014...

Using natural language processing, we identify corporate goals stated in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated, from less than one on average in 1955 to more than 7 in 2020. While in 1955, profit...

We find that financial conditions in the core have significant spillover effects on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). On average, a 1 percentage point easing of the IMF US Financial Conditions Index is associated with approximately a 10% higher volume of cross-border M&As. The...

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed...