Poor loan quality is often attributed to loan officers exercising poor judgment. A potential solution is to base loans on hard information alone. However, we find other consequences of bypassing discretion stemming from loan officer incentives and limits of hard information verifiability. Using...

Partisan perception affects the actions of professionals in the financial sector. Using a novel dataset linking credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts who are not affiliated with the U.S. president's party downward-adjust corporate credit ratings...

This paper examines the effect of banking on economic growth in modern Russia. To overcome simultaneity and selection, we exploit regional banking variation induced by the creation of "specialized banks" (spetsbanks) in the last years of the Soviet Union (1988-1991). Consistent with the...

We study the effects of the liberty bond drives of World War I on financial intermediation in the 1920s and beyond. Using panel data on U.S. counties, and an instrument that captures differences in the approaches used to market the bonds, we find that higher liberty bond subscription rates led...

We have seen in the past decade a sharp increase in the extent that companies use data to optimize their businesses. Variously called the `Big Data' or `Data Science' revolution, this has been characterized by massive amounts of data, including unstructured and nontraditional data like text and...

Using a sample of highly (over-)leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance (return on assets, net profit margin). In particular, a reduction in leverage leads to a decrease in...

We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms, and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the financing costs faced by low...

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously...

This paper examines mortgage outcomes for a large, representative sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets in the recent housing boom and bust. Among those with similar credit scores and loan attributes, black and Hispanic homeowners...

Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate information asymmetries when delivering credit to the poor. This paper proposes an empirical method to address the potential omitted variable problem resulting from unobserved...