"Buy Now, Pay Later" (BNPL) is a key innovation in consumer payments. It bundles the sale of a product with a subsidized loan, effectively offering lower prices to low-creditworthiness customers. BNPL thereby allows merchants to price-discriminate among customers with different...

Exploiting geographic variation in the exposure of U.S. banks to COVID-19 and lockdown policies we find that banks more exposed to pandemic and lockdown policies show an increase in loss provisions and non-performing loans. While we observe an increase in corporate, especially small business,...

Banks are closing branches at an unprecedented rate. In various countries up to four out of five branches have been closed, while in the US over 11,000 branches representing eleven percent o its peak stock in 2009 have been closed so far. To differentiate between various explanations for this...

Violations of financial covenants shift control rights to lenders. When borrowers have lending relationships with these lenders in control, they experience not only smaller declines in investment, but also lesser deteriorations in both firm survival prob- abilities and in sales. These effects...

Using Compustat to measure industry concentration in the U.S. is problematic. Popular approximations of the Herfindahl Index based on this data set have a vanishingly low correlation with the more comprehensive Census measure. As a result, major variables of interest in corporate finance show...

This article discusses the treatment of fixed capital in Classical theory of price. Sraffa uses non-linear depreciation of “physical” capital that equalizes all annual profit rates individually, but violates the proportionality of monetary machine value reduction and physical use-up on an...