We review research on the effects of banks on the real economy, including, but not limited to
articles in this Special Issue of the Journal of Corporate Finance. We focus primarily on US …

Many studies use shift-share (or “Bartik”) instruments, which average a set of shocks with
exposure share weights. We provide a new econometric framework for shift-share …

Many studies in economics use instruments or treatments which combine a set of
exogenous shocks with other predetermined variables by a known formula. Examples …

We study inference in shift-share regression designs, such as when a regional outcome is
regressed on a weighted average of sectoral shocks, using regional sector shares as …

The Bartik instrument is formed by interacting local industry shares and national industry
growth rates. We show that the typical use of a Bartik instrument assumes a pooled …

ABSTRACT A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of
immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes. To address the endogeneity of …

This paper discusses empirical approaches macroeconomists use to answer questions like:
What does monetary policy do? How large are the effects of fiscal stimulus? What caused …

We document that finance companies and FinTech lenders increased lending to small
businesses after the 2008 financial crisis. We show that most of the increase substituted for a …

This paper studies whether distance shapes credit allocation by estimating the impact of
bank branch closings during the 2000s on local access to credit. To generate plausibly …

Lending cuts by banks directly affect the firms borrowing from them, but also indirectly
depress economic activity in the regions in which they operate. This paper moves beyond …