This paper provides evidence that commercial lenders in Peru free ride off their peers' screening efforts. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, the study finds that competing lenders responded to additional loan approvals by issuing approvals of their own....

We find that competition from payday lenders leads depository institutions to raise overdraft fees and reduce the availability of “free” checking accounts. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks’ practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the...

The first paper is co-authored with Sylvain Delalay. We examine the impact of competition between ETFs on measures of market quality of the funds. The surge in new ETF creation has for consequence that groups of competing ETFs are increasingly crowded, and investors can choose from a multitude...

This paper investigates the credit channel in Germany and the United Kingdom. The financial systems of these two countries show substantial structural differences, which leads one to expect that their real sectors respond differently to changes in monetary policy. To the extent that this is the...

A recent survey has shown that the major problem faced by firms in Latin American countries is difficulty in accessing financial markets. Figure 1 summarizes the findings of the Business Environment Survey on obstacles faced by firms.