We use bank-firm matched data to study how the capital buffers that large U.S. banks must satisfy to “pass” the Federal Reserve's stress tests impact banks’ lending and firms’ loan volumes, overall debt, investment, and employment. We find that larger stress-test capital buffers lead to reductions in banks’ lending, modest increases in loan rates and spreads, and reductions in new loan originations. However, we do not find an impact of higher capital buffers on firms’ overall debt, investment, and employment, suggesting that firms find other credit sources to substitute for the reduction in loans from banks that participate in the stress tests.

We consider the revision properties of Federal Reserve Board staff estimates of the output gap after the mid-1990s and examine the usefulness of these estimates for inflation forecasting. Over this period, we find that the Federal Reserve's output gap is more reliably estimated in real time than previous studies have documented for earlier periods and alternative estimation techniques. In contrast to previous work, we also find no deterioration in forecast performance when inflation projections are conditioned on real-time rather than on final estimates of the output gap.