This paper studies the effects of financial distress on workers' productivity. We use detailed data from the public school system in Texas, which allow us to exploit within-teacher variation and to control for a student's economic environment. We show that student performance decreases by 6.5%...

This paper studies the role of workplace peers in the transmission of information pertinent to an important household financial decision: the mortgage refinancing choice. Exploiting commonalities in teaching schedules of school teachers in Texas to identify peer groups, we find that refinancing...

Following the onset of COVID-19, research production in economics and finance (measured by the posting of working papers) increased by 29%. Production increases were widespread across geographies, job titles, departments, and ages with larger increases in top departments and for people under the...

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) are less likely and slower to downgrade firms with performance-sensitive debt (PSD) if these downgrades increase borrowing costs. This effect is not driven by selection into PSD contracts, borrowers hiding information from CRAs, or by firms about to lose their...

This paper examines whether employees involved in RMBS securitization experienced internal and external labor market consequences relative to similar non-RMBS employees in the same banks, and why. Senior RMBS bankers experienced similar levels of job retention, promotion, and external job market...

ZIP codes with high concentrations of originators who misreported mortgage information experienced a 75% larger relative increase in house prices from 2003 to 2006 and a 90% larger relative decrease from 2007 to 2012 compared to other ZIP codes. Several causality tests show that high fractions...

Despite loan modification being widely discussed as an alternative to foreclosure, little research has focused on quantifying its effect on loan performance. I quantify the effects of additional modifications made early in the recent housing crisis by exploiting exogenous variation in the...

Ten years after the financial crisis, the central question of what explains the rise and fall in house prices remains unresolved. We provide a unified framework to examine four excess credit supply variables and three speculation variables that have been proposed in the literature. Credit supply...

Securitized mortgage appraisals routinely target pre-specified valuations, 45% of purchase loan appraisals exactly equal purchase prices, and appraisals virtually never fall below purchase prices. As a result, appraisals exceed automated valuation model (AVM) valuations 60% of the time and are...