Hail the gatekeepers!
Yael Hochberg, Carlos Serrano, and Rosemarie Ziedonis estimate the effect of patent trading activity on the rate of startup lending and the role of venture capital in accessing lending markets.
Big or small: a look at bank size and loan quality
How does bank size relate to the quality of loans? New work by Hugo Rodríguez Mendizábal presents evidence of a large and opposite relationship in loan quality between large and small banks in the U.S.
More or less competitive banking?
Xavier Freixas and Kebin Ma reexamine the classical issue of the possible trade-offs between banking competition and financial stability by highlighting different types of risk and the role of leverage. By means of a simple model, they show that competition can affect portfolio risk, insolvency risk, liquidity risk, and systemic risk in different ways.
How much to tax and how to spend tax money?
How much should people be taxed and what should tax revenues be spent on? Surprisingly, these topics have mostly been treated in isolation in academic research. Joan Esteban and Laura Mayoral present a model that determines the consensus income tax schedule, the composition of public expenditure, and the size of government.
