In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

We test for racial discrimination in the prices charged by mortgage lenders. We construct a unique dataset where we observe all three dimensions of a mortgage's price: the interest rate, discount points, and fees. While we find statistically significant gaps by race and ethnicity in interest...

We study how information sharing between banks influences the geographical clustering of branches. A spatial oligopoly model first explains why branches cluster and how information sharing impacts price competition and equilibrium clustering. With data on 59,333 branches of 676 banks in 22...

We interview 379 European bank CEOs to identify their banks' main competitors. We then provide evidence on the drivers of bilateral bank competition, construct a novel competition measure at the locality level, and assess how well it explains variation in firms' credit constraints. We find that...

We examine the impact of household mortgages on house prices. Using biannual data on Italian cities for the years 2003-2015, we build an exogenous and fully data-driven indicator of mortgage supply stances and use it as an instrument for actual extended mortgages. Our results indicate that...

We test for racial discrimination in the prices charged by mortgage lenders. We construct a unique dataset where we observe all three dimensions of a mortgage's price: the interest rate, discount points, and fees. While we find statistically significant gaps by race and ethnicity in interest...

The paper investigates whether firms have better access to bank credit in areas with a larger degree of urbanization. It uses bank-firm data drawn from the Credit Register maintained at the Bank of Italy to devise an indicator of ease of access to credit. The paper proposes an instrumental...

Financial inclusion has been accorded high importance by the GoI and RBI to aid the inclusive growth process of the economy but the impact of these did not yield agreeable results. There have been formidable challenges in this area such as bringing sections of society that are financially...

This paper provides novel evidence on the effects of LTV limits on housing choices. I exploit the 2010 and 2012 introduction of LTV limits in Israel using a detailed loan-level dataset. I find that the LTV limits, which were designed to lower borrowers' risk, resulted in borrowers choosing more...

Countries, developing as well as developed are emphasising environment sustainability of agricultural production, methods and practices. The traditional wisdom of farmers on indigenous agrarian practices increasingly being called into question owing to a host of factors. This paper tries to...