I document that floating-rate loans from banks, particularly important for bank-dependent firms, drive most variation in firms’ exposure to interest rates. I argue that banks prefer to supply floating-rate loans, due to their finite ability to transform short-duration deposit liabilities into long duration assets. Three key findings support this argument: banks with more floating-rate liabilities make more floating-rate loans, hold more floating-rate securities, and quote lower prices for floating-rate loans. Intermediary funding structures therefore help determine what types of contracts non-financial firms use. Banks transmit rising policy rates to firms by contractually raising interest rates on existing loans, not just by reducing the supply of new loans.

What drives macro-financial vulnerabilities? Inspired by Minsky–Kindleberger narratives, one prominent view emphasizes that lending standards repeatedly deteriorate in good times, creating exposure to widespread reassessments of risk. Another emphasizes that leverage amplifies negative shocks. This paper constructs panel data on lending standards and uses it to show that Minsky–Kindleberger dynamics interact with leverage. Standards erode with improving economic performance, but do not always co-move with aggregate leverage. The combination of deteriorating standards and leverage—above and beyond leverage alone—signals poor subsequent macroeconomic performance. Inconsistent with models incorporating rational expectations, this poor subsequent performance is systematically reflected in forecast errors.

The financial crisis pushed some large life insurers to the brink of insolvency. Instead of gambling for resurrection, insurers in severe distress pulled back from risk taking. They systematically reduced risk appetite relative to insurers with low default probabilities across many jointly available individual incremental investment opportunities. Importantly, as insurers in distress reduced risk even within investment opportunities with identical treatment, regulatory constraints alone cannot explain these findings. This evidence suggests that franchise value can make gambling for resurrection too risky, even following severe shocks to large financial institutions' solvency. Actions that clarify future prospects, like stress tests, may be needed to support risk appetite during crises.

Reference rates like LIBOR were designed to reflect banks’ full cost of funds, including credit premia. With publication of LIBOR expected to cease soon, regulators have recommended a shift to risk-free reference rates. To study the implications of this shift, this paper develops a tractable model of bank lending and hedging in which the design of reference rates shapes the allocation of risk in equilibrium. Reference rates that capture credit risk, but are sufficiently free from manipulation, could improve welfare relative to risk-free reference rates. It remains an open question whether such reference rates can be constructed.

This paper studies how private equity creates value and its consequences for consumer welfare in the insurance industry, where PE investments grew tenfold following the financial crisis. PE firms add value through regulatory and tax arbitrage that increases profits relative to their non-PE counterparts. Crucially, the impact on consumer welfare is nuanced: in the short run, consumers benefit from more favorably priced products. But the arbitrage strategy also exposes them to more risk, as annual expected losses scaled by capital buffers rise by 50 percentage points. This creates the possibility of consumer harm in the event of a downturn.