This paper investigates employment effects of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policies (QE) via a bank lending channel. We find that banks with higher mortgage-backed securities holdings refinanced relatively more mortgages after the first round of QE, which increased local consumption and employment in the nontradable goods sector. In contrast, banks increased lending to firms and home purchase mortgage origination after the third round of QE, which led to a sizable increase in overall employment. Our findings are supported by new confidential loan-level data that show firms with stronger ties to affected banks increased employment and capital investment more during QE3.

Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1863 through 2024 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding. These commonalities imply that bank failures are highly predictable using simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements. Failures with runs were common before deposit insurance, but these failures are strongly related to weak fundamentals, casting doubt on the importance of non-fundamental runs. Furthermore, low recovery rates on failed banks’ assets suggest that most failed banks subject to runs were fundamentally insolvent, barring large value destruction of receiverships. Altogether, our evidence suggests that the primary cause of bank failures and banking crises is almost always and everywhere a deterioration of bank fundamentals.

ABSTRACT Corporate credit lines are drawn more heavily when funding markets are stressed. This elevates expected bank funding costs. We show that credit supply is dampened by the associated debt‐overhang cost to bank shareholders. Until 2022, this impact was reduced by linking the interest paid on lines to a credit‐sensitive reference rate like the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR). We show that transition to risk‐free reference rates may exacerbate this friction. The adverse impact on credit supply is offset if drawdowns are expected to be deposited at the same bank, which happened at some of the largest banks during the global financial crisis and COVID recession.