We document capital misallocation in the U.S. investment-grade (IG) corporate bond market, driven by quantitative easing (QE). Prospective fallen angels -- risky firms just above the IG rating cutoff -- enjoyed subsidized bond financing since 2009, especially when the scale of QE purchases...

Based on archival and survey data we show that the maturity of U.S. business loans has been continuously increasing since the mid-1930s when banks invented the term loan. Concurrently, bank innovation first involved the invention of credit analysis and covenant design. Later, bank innovation...

While major stock market indices are followed by large monetary investments, we document that membership decisions for the S&P 500 index have a nontrivial amount of discretion. We show that firms' purchases of S&P ratings appear to improve their chance of entering the index (but purchases of...

Investor concerns about climate and other environmental regulatory risks suggest that these risks should affect corporate bond risk assessment and pricing. We test this hypothesis and find that firms with poor environmental profiles or high carbon footprints tend to have lower credit ratings and...

US government bonds are widely considered to be the world's safe store of value. US government bonds are a large fraction of safe asset portfolios, such as the porfolios of many central banks. The world demand for safe assets leads to low yields on US Treasury bonds. During periods of economic...

We combine the Decennial Census, credit reports, and administrative earnings to create the first panel dataset linking parent's credit access to the labor market outcomes of children in the U.S. We find that a 10% increase in parent's unused revolving credit during their children's adolescence...

Since the 2000s, economists across fields have increasingly used consumer credit reporting data for research. We introduce readers to the economics of and the institutional details of these data. Using examples from the literature, we provide practical guidance on how to use these data to...

Credit scores are critical for allocating consumer debt in the United States, yet little evidence is available on their performance. We benchmark a widely used credit score against a machine learning model of consumer default and find significant misclassification of borrowers, especially those...