"The roughly 9.5 percent of all U.S. families that are without some type of transaction account (unbanked) are disproportionately represented by minorities. The unbanked often must rely on alternative ways to carry out basic financial transactions such as cashing payroll checks and paying bills....

I employ unique data on secondary loan trades to explore how information asymmetry and the quality of financial reporting affect the trading spreads of private debt securities. There are two primary findings. First, the bid-ask spread in secondary loan trading is positively related to firm and...