We exploit an exogenous reduction in bank supervision and examination to demonstrate a causal effect of supervisory oversight on financial institutions’ risk taking. The additional risk took the form of risky lending, faster asset growth, and a greater reliance on low-quality capital. This response to less oversight boosted banks’ odds of failure. Lastly, we show that the reduction in oversight capacity led to more costly failures because there were longer delays in closing insolvent institutions, and because more bad assets were passed to the government insurance fund.

This paper provides a comprehensive study of the interplay between the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and overnight interest rates. We model both the supply of and the demand for excess reserves. Treating outright securities holdings of the Federal Reserve as a policy tool, we estimate the effects of unconventional monetary policy on overnight funding rates. Further, we offer the first empirical assessment of the FOMC’s principles of the exit strategy. Assuming a path for removing monetary policy accommodation that is consistent with the FOMC’s exit principles, we project that the federal funds rate increases to 70 basis points by 2016, settling in a corridor bracketed by the discount rate and the interest rate on excess reserves, as excess reserves of depository institutions decline to near zero.

We identify all return leader–follower pairs among individual stocks using Granger causality regressions. Thus-identified leaders reliably predict their followers’ returns out of sample, and the return predictability works at the level of individual stocks rather than industries. Our results indicate that, independent of its size, any firm may emerge as a return leader by being at the center of an important news development that has ramifications for other firms. Indeed, stocks undergoing news-generating developments see an increase in the number of stocks whose returns they lead.

We classify a unique and comprehensive data set of corporate press releases into topics and study the market reaction to various types of news. While confirming prior findings regarding strong stock price responses to financial news, we also document significant reactions to news about corporate strategy, customers and partners, products and services, management changes, and legal developments. Consistent with regulators' expectations, the level of informational asymmetry in the market declines following most types of press releases. At the same time, return volatility frequently increases in the post-announcement period, which we show can be attributed to higher levels of valuation uncertainty.

We study the impact of the U.S. money market fund reform implemented in October 2016 on global banks' funding supply and business activities. We show that the reform induced a large negative wholesale funding shock for global banks. In contrast to the conventional bank lending channel, the primary response of global banks to the reform was a cutback in arbitrage positions that relied on unsecured funding, rather than a reduction in loan provision. We discuss the role of postcrisis liquidity regulations and unconventional monetary policy in explaining our findings, and implications for banks' business models and deposit competition.