The paper looked at how banks in the U.S. changed their lending practices in the early 1990s. They studied data from 1979 to 1992 to see if new rules about how much money banks needed to keep on hand affected how much they lent out. The researchers found that the shift from loans to securities was not mainly caused by banks with low money reserves taking fewer risks. Instead, other factors like changes in what customers wanted played a bigger role.