The provision of venture debt financing to growth-oriented startups which are backed by venture capital (VC) equity has been a bit of a puzzle given the lack of positive cash flows or traditional collateral of such startups. This short paper lays out the hurdles for debt to overcome to be a...

Can peer-to-peer lending (P2P) crowdfunding disintermediate and mitigate information frictions in lending such that choices and outcomes for at least some borrowers and investors are improved? I offer a framing of issues and survey the nascent literature on P2P. On the investor side, P2P...

Using state-level variation over time in the top deciles of the income distribution, we observe that non-rich households consume a larger share of their current income when exposed to a higher top income and consumption levels. We argue that permanent income, wealth effects, and upward local...

More patriotic countries have greater home bias in their equity selection. In a panel of World Values Surveys covering 53 countries, measures of patriotism are positively related to home bias measures after controlling for transaction barriers, diversification benefits, information, and...

Does access to high-interest credit (payday loans) exacerbate or mitigate individual financial distress. Using natural disasters as an exogenous shock, I apply a propensity score-matched, triple-difference specification to identify a causal relation between welfare and access to credit....

Wan (2013) argues that the statistical inferences in our Journal of Finance (2011) paper are not robust, as we do not prove that it is powerful CEOs that rig incentive contracts. Wan makes the theoretical claim that the rigging results are consistent with ex-post optimal re-contracting. However,...