I find that shadow bank money creation significantly expands during monetary-tightening cycles. This “shadow banking channel” offsets reductions in commercial bank deposits and dampens the impact of monetary policy. Using a structural model of bank competition, I show that the difference in depositor clienteles quantitatively explains banks’ different responses to monetary policy. Facing a more yield-sensitive clientele, shadow banks are more likely to pass through rate hikes to depositors, thereby attracting more deposits when the Federal Reserve raises rates. My results suggest that monetary tightening could unintentionally increase financial fragility by driving deposits into the uninsured shadow banking sector.

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates factional arrangements within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Using detailed biographical information of political elites in the Central Committee and provincial governments, we present a set of new empirical regularities within the CCP, including systematic patterns of cross‐factional balancing at different levels of the political hierarchy and substantial faction premia in promotions. We propose and estimate an organizational economic model to characterize factional politics within single‐party nondemocratic regimes and its economic implications.

Using data on individual portfolio holdings and on mutual fund flows, we find that low interest rates lead to significantly higher demand for income‐generating assets such as high‐dividend stocks and high‐yield bonds. We argue that this “reaching‐for‐income” phenomenon is driven by investors who follow the “living off income” rule‐of‐thumb. Our empirical analysis shows that this preference for current income affects both household portfolio choices and the prices of income‐generating assets. In addition, we explore the implications of reaching for income for capital allocation and the effectiveness of monetary policy.

Liquidity provision is often attributed to debt-issuing intermediaries like banks. We develop a unified theoretical framework and empirically show that mutual funds issuing demandable equity also provide an economically significant amount of liquidity by insuring against idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. Quantitatively, bond funds provide 12.5% of the liquidity that banks provide per dollar. Our model further shows that when equity values incorporate the liquidation cost from redemptions, as in swing pricing, liquidity provision is not necessarily reduced. This is because swing pricing may increase funds’ capacity for holding illiquid assets without inducing panic runs.