Blended finance---the use of public and philanthropic funding to crowd in private capital---is a potential way to finance a more sustainable world. While blended finance holds the promise of being catalytic in mobilizing vast amounts of private capital, little is known about this practice. In...

The use of private capital to finance biodiversity conservation and restoration is a new practice in sustainable finance. This study sheds light on this new practice. First, we provide a conceptual framework that lays out how biodiversity can be financed by i) pure private capital and ii)...

We study the provision of financial services to small firms, consumers, and workers in developing countries as part of value chain relationships: value chain microfinance (VCMF). We first explore how VCMF can both overcome barriers to financial access - including asymmetric information,...

Using a two-period model of a commodity market with a large number of atomistic consumers and two strategic sellers, we show that a speculator with access to storage can lower the market price while buying and raise the price while selling by clever use of limit, stop-loss, and market orders....

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

We analyze the value of insurance when individuals have access to credit markets. Loans allow consumers to smooth financial shocks over time, decreasing the value of consumption smoothing from insurance. We derive formulas for the value of insurance that can be taken to data, and show how that...

Almost 50 million Americans are burdened by the need to repay almost $2 trillion in student loan debt, while at the same time having to save for retirement. This article analyzes the potential impact of the 2022 SECURE 2.0 Act reform which permits employers to match contributions for student...

The failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank (FSB), one of the only Black-serving banks in the early post-bellum South, was an economic catastrophe and one of the great episodes of racial exploitation in post-Emancipation history. It was also most Black Americans' first experience of banking. Can...

We develop a new dataset to study homeowners insurance. Our data on over 47 million observations of households' property insurance expenditures from 2014-2023 are inferred from mortgage escrow payments. First, we find a sharp 33% increase in average premiums from 2020 to 2023 (13% in real terms)...

A rent guarantee insurance (RGI) policy makes a limited number of rent payments to the landlord on behalf of an insured tenant unable to pay rent due to a negative income or health expenditure shock. We introduce RGI in a rich quantitative equilibrium model of housing insecurity and show it...