We analyze the information content of the digital footprint - information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website - for predicting consumer default. Using more than 250,000 observations, we show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital...

We analyze the effect of a major central bank digital currency (CBDC) - the digital euro - on the payment industry to find remarkably heterogeneous effects. Stock prices of U.S. payment firms decrease, while stock prices of European payment firms increase in response to positive announcements on...

In this paper, we review the growing literature on FinTech lending - the provision of credit facilitated by technology that improves the customer-lender interaction or lenders' screening and monitoring of borrowers. FinTech lending has grown rapidly, though in developed economies like the U.S....

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...

The $669 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) provides highly subsidized financing to small businesses. The PPP is a positive shock in financing supply to the small, highly constrained publicly listed firms in our sample and has average positive treatment effects. Yet, uptake is not...

Using a survey of AFA members, we analyze how demographics, time allocation, production mechanisms, and institutional factors affect research production during the pandemic. Consistent with the literature, research productivity falls more for women and faculty with young children. Independently...

We conduct beauty contest experiments, using close to 2,000 subjects to study the facial traits of CEOs. In one experiment we use pairs of photographs and find that subjects rate CEO faces as appearing more "competent" and less "likable" than non-CEO faces. Another experiment matches CEOs from...

We use a unique, new, database to examine micro depositor level data for a bank that faced a run. We use minute-by-minute depositor withdrawal data to understand the effectiveness of deposit insurance, the role of social networks, and the importance of bank-depositor relationships in influencing...

We use a new data set that tracks U.S. firms from their birth over two decades to understand the life cycle dynamics and outcomes (both successes and failures) of VC- and non-VC financed firms. We first ask to what market-wide and firm-level characteristics venture capitalists respond in...

This paper presents some of the first large-scale survey evidence linking optimism to major economic choices. We create a novel measure of optimism using the Survey of Consumer Finance by comparing a person's self-reported life expectancy to that implied by statistical tables. Optimists are more...