We distinguish the impact of information technology adoption on information processing costs and agency costs by conducting a randomized control trial with a bank that adopts a new credit-scoring tool. The availability of scores significantly increases credit committees' effort and output on...

We estimate the elasticity of exports to credit using matched customs and firm-level bank credit data from Peru. To account for non-credit determinants of exports, we compare changes in exports of the same product and to the same destination by firms borrowing from banks differentially affected...

We estimate risk aversion from the actual financial decisions of 2,168 investors in Lending Club (LC), a person-to-person lending platform. We develop a methodology that allows us to estimate risk aversion parameters from each portfolio choice. Since the same individual makes repeated...

We present evidence that shared codes, religious beliefs, ethnicity - cultural proximity - between lenders and borrowers improves the efficiency of credit allocation. We identify in-group preferential treatment using dyadic data on the religion and caste of bank officers and borrowers from a...

This paper traces career transitions of federal and state U.S. banking regulators from a large sample of publicly available curricula vitae, and provides basic facts on worker flows between the regulatory and private sector resulting from the revolving door. We find strong countercyclical net...

An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which...

Yes, it did. We use exogenous variation in banks' incentives to conform to the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) around regulatory exam dates to trace out the effect of the CRA on lending activity. Our empirical strategy compares lending behavior of banks undergoing CRA exams...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

We use a unique dataset that combines information on advertising by subprime lenders and mortgages originated by them from 2002 to 2007 to study the relationship between advertising and the nature of mortgages obtained by consumers. We exploit the richness of our data and measure the relative...

We study the recent episode of bank failures and provide simple facts to better understand who acquires failed banks and which forces drive the losses that the FDIC realizes from these sales. We document three distinct forces related to the allocation of failed banks to potential acquirers....