This dissertation consists of three separate essays. In the first essay, privatization is found to improve bank performance by both better monitoring of existing firms, and improved selection of new bank clients. Data on firms borrowing from government-owned banks, and firms borrowing from a...

This special issue of the B. E. Journal of Macroeconomics collects papers presented at a Conference on Empirical Macroeconomics Using Geographical Data, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 18, 2011.

How should monetary policy and macro-prudential regulation respond to the dangers of financial bubbles? I argue that bubbles - and their collapse - become a serious problem when there is inadequate risk-sharing. Neither monetary policy nor traditional macro-prudential regulation is designed to...

Theory suggests that greater hierarchical distance between a subordinate and his boss makes it more difficult to share abstract and subjective information in decision making. A novel dataset put together from credit dossiers of large corporate loan applicants enables us to observe the...

We show that institutions that promote financial development ease borrowing constraints by lowering the collateral spread and shifting the composition of acceptable collateral towards firm-specific assets. Collateral spread is defined as the difference in collateralization rates between high-...

Large scale migrations, especially involuntary ones, can have a substantial impact on the demographics of both sending and receiving communities. We estimate the impact of the 1947 Indian subcontinent partition, one of the largest and most rapid population exchanges in human history. Comparing...

For policy and academia it is crucial to quantify the real effects of the bank lending channel. We analyze the impact of securitization of real estate assets on the supply of credit to non real-estate firms, including risk-taking, and the associated real effects. For identification, we use the...

While banks may change their supply of credit due to bank balance sheet shocks (the local lending channel), firms can react by adjusting their sources of financing in equilibrium (the aggregate lending channel). We formalize a methodology for separately estimating these effects. We estimate the...