Conference Agenda

This paper investigates how marketplace lending affects household credit after natural disasters. Using over seven million LendingClub loan applications and variation across 61 U.S. disasters during the sector’s expansion, we analyze platforms’ responses to disaster-driven credit demand. Using modern staggered difference-in-differences methods, we show marketplace loan demand rises by about 11% in the months after a disaster, but not during the disaster month. The effect is strongest where small banks are scarce, suggesting substitution for relationship lending. We find little evidence of credit tightening: approval, pricing, risk grading, and borrower performance remain largely stable, underscoring marketplace lending’s resilience.

Recognizing the profound influence of geopolitical risks and world uncertainty on financial investment behaviour, this study uses a comprehensive approach to assess the impact of rising geopolitical risk on sovereign debt holdings for a panel of 24 OECD economies from Q1 2004 to Q4 2023. To do so, we employ Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) fixed effects and Quantile Regression techniques within a panel data framework to capture the nuanced effects on both domestic and foreign entities. We find that escalating geopolitical tension decreases government debt holdings among domestic entities, notably domestic Banks, while foreign investors increase their ownership. This phenomenon is more pronounced for high proportion levels of debt in investor’s portfolios. Our results allow us to conclude that while domestic economic agents display clearer risk aversion, foreign economic agents have a more risk-taking behaviour in what concerns the financial investment on government debt.

Credit tightening and its impact on international trade have attracted substantial academic attention, particularly following the Global Financial Crisis. While firm-level studies highlight the role of credit rationing in shaping firms’ international behavior, they often overlook cross-country heterogeneity and focus on firm-specific rather than systemic constraints. Conversely, country-level analyses emphasize credit costs, paying less attention to access conditions and often facing endogeneity concerns. Moreover, the literature has largely focused on export flows, with limited attention to trade within Global Value Chains (GVCs). This paper contributes to the literature by providing a cross-country analysis based on an identification strategy designed to isolate the effects of supply-driven credit tightening on trade, with a particular focus on trade within GVCs. The results show that GVC-related trade responds more strongly and significantly to changes in credit conditions than traditional trade. Moreover, the findings highlight the key role of trade credit in mitigating liquidity constraints, particularly in downstream segments of the value chain. These results are robust across a range of model specifications, including controls for sectoral heterogeneity and interactions capturing foreign banking exposure and commercial dependence.

This paper provides the first comprehensive evidence on the distributional effects of the UK ringfencing regulation on mortgage credit allocation and pricing. Introduced after the Global Financial Crisis and fully implemented in 2019, ring-fencing required large banking groups to separate core retail activities from investment banking operations, reshaping funding structures and lending incentives. Using a unique dataset of over 13 million mortgages granted between 2010 and 2024, we examine how ring-fencing affected mortgage spreads, lending standards, and access to credit across borrower groups and market segments. Consistent with prior research, we document an aggregate decline in mortgage spreads following the reform. However, we show that these reductions were disproportionately larger for young borrowers and households in economically deprived regions, indicating a significant reduction in risk premia for traditionally disadvantaged groups. We also find that ring-fenced banks increased their tolerance for higher loan-to-value lending, particularly in the first-time buyer segment. During the cost-of-living crisis, ring-fenced banks absorbed a greater share of funding cost shocks for borrowers in disadvantaged areas. Overall, our findings demonstrate that structural banking reform can materially affect not only financial stability and pricing, but also the distribution of credit and inequality in housing finance.