Utility subsidies are often defended as promoting universal service. However, specific support formulas may be poorly targeted and/or designed. The U.S. high cost loop support (HCLS) program (formerly referred to as the Universal Service Fund (USF)), has been a key component of the FCC's USF...

Building on the pioneering study by Beck, Demirguc-Kunt and Levine (2006), we examine the effects of media ownership and concentration on corruption in bank lending. Using the unique World Bank dataset covering more than 5,000 firms across 59 countries, we find strong evidence that that state...

We study the relationship between banks' IT capabilities and their ability to serve customers during the demand shock for digital banking services generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid mobility restrictions, banks with better IT experience larger reductions in physical branch visits and...

We assess the impact of the geographic expansion of bank assets on the cost of banks' interest-bearing liabilities. Existing research suggests that expansion can both intensify agency problems that increase funding costs and facilitate risk diversification that decreases funding costs. Using a...

Building on the growing literature on inter-firm links and limited attention, we find evidence of return predictability across alliance partners. A long-short portfolio sorted on lagged returns of strategic alliance partners provides a return of 89 basis points per month that is robust to a...

This paper documents that changes in litigation risk affect corporate voluntary disclosure practices. We make causal inferences by exploiting three legal events that generate exogenous variations in firms' litigation risk. Using a matching-based, fixed-effect difference-indifferences design, we...

We investigate how communication within banks affects small-business lending. Using travel time between a bank's headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times to evaluate the impact of within bank communication...

We evaluate the impact of the credit conditions facing corporations on their emissions of toxic air pollutants. Exploiting cross-county, cross-time shale discoveries that generated liquidity windfalls at local bank branches, we construct measures of (1) the degree to which banks in non-shale...

This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect capital investment using the industrial census of manufacturing firms in China, where minimum wage policies vary across counties. Exploiting minimum wage policy discontinuities at county borders, we find that minimum wages increase capital...

Since social distancing is the primary strategy for slowing the spread of many diseases, understanding why U.S. counties respond differently to COVID-19 is critical for designing effective public policies. Using daily data from about 45 million mobile phones to measure social distancing we...