We develop tests for discrimination that we apply to 25 years of mortgage lending. Our tests limit the scope for omitted variables in a conventional benchmarking test by combining high-frequency mortgage evaluations with the notion that economic incentives can mitigate subjective biases. Loan...

Monetary policy works through financial markets to affect real consumer decisions. Buying a home is one of the most important consumer decisions, and we study the impact of the FOMC cycle on the timing and cost of mortgage applications. We find that the FOMC cycle is a focal point of attention...

Corporate loan contracts frequently concentrate control rights with a subset of lenders. In a large fraction of leveraged loans, which typically include a revolving line of credit and a term loan, the revolving lenders have the exclusive right and ability to monitor and renegotiate the financial...

This paper investigates the impact of uncertainty on consumer credit outcomes. We develop a local measure of economic uncertainty capturing county-level labor market shocks. We then exploit microeconomic data on mortgages and credit-card balances together with the crosssectional variation...

This paper investigates the impact of uncertainty on consumer credit outcomes. We develop a local measure of economic uncertainty capturing county-level labor market shocks. We then exploit microeconomic data on mortgages and credit-card balances together with the crosssectional variation...

We find that corporate loan contracts frequently concentrate control rights with a subset of lenders. Despite the rise in term loans without financial covenants—so-called covenant-lite loans—borrowing firms' revolving lines of credit almost always retain traditional financial covenants. This...

This paper studies information aggregation in financial markets with recurrent investor exit and entry. I consider a dynamic general equilibrium model of asset trading with private information and collateral constraints. Investors differ in their aversion to Knightian uncertainty: When...

Relying on theories in which bank loans create deposits—a process we call “funding liquidity creation”—we measure how much funding liquidity the U.S. banking system creates. Private money creation by banks enables lending to not be constrained by the supply of cash deposits. During the...