Using the future residence of home sellers, we compare a seller who will relocate to another state and thus will likely not provide referrals with a seller who remains in the state and thus might bring referrals. We find that moving-out-of-state sellers' residences take more days to sell than...

We study the U.S. origination-to-distribution mortgage financing market from the mid 1990s to the late 2000s. Mortgage loan brokers originated close to two thirds of the mortgage loans in this period. We examine whether stricter licensing requirements of loan brokers raise lending standards by...

Mortgage banking subsidiaries of bank holding companies (BHCs) became increasingly active players in the mortgage origination market during the last decade. At the time, the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) had supervisory power over BHCs, and under the Bank Holding Company Act was authorized to...

This paper examines the incentive provision when the agent can respond to risk by exerting effort to collect information about the underlying state and making corresponding decisions. Such effort is shown to be more valuable in a riskier environment and incentives can increase with "respondable"...

Oversight in policing involves investigating officers for complaints against them and punishing them if found guilty. Officers commit errors in policing and, since reducing the error rate is costly, they cut down policing to avoid complaints. This paper tests the hypothesis that oversight...

Traditional agency theory treats risk as pure measurement error, yielding the standard prediction of risk-incentive tradeoff. This paper proposes a model in which the agent can respond to risk: he can exert effort to collect information about the underlying state in order to make correct...