Background: This study aims to clarify the role of FinTech digital banking start-ups in the financial industry. We examine the impact of the funding of such start-ups on the stock returns of 47 incumbent US retail banks for 2010 to 2016. Methods: To capture the importance of FinTech start-ups, we use data on both the dollar-volume of funding and number of deals. We relate these to the stock returns with panel data regression methods. Results: Our results indicate a positive relationship exists between the growth in FinTech funding or deals and the contemporaneous stock returns of incumbent retail banks. Conclusions: Although these results suggest complementarity between FinTech and traditional banking, we note that our results at the banking industry level are not statistically significant, and that the coefficient signs for about one-third of the banks are negative, but not statistically significant. Since the FinTech industry is young and our sample period short, we cannot rule out that our findings are spurious.

We document capital misallocation in the U.S. investment-grade (IG) corporate bond market, driven by quantitative easing (QE). Prospective fallen angels --risky firms just above the IG rating cutoff --enjoyed subsidized bond financing since 2009, especially when the scale of QE purchases peaked and from IG-focused investors that held more securities purchased in QE programs. The benefiting firms used this privilege to fund risky acquisitions and increase market share, exploiting the sluggish adjustment of credit ratings in downgrading after M&A and adversely affecting competitors' employment and investment. Eventually, these firms suffered more severe downgrades at the onset of the pandemic.

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