During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

We randomly assigned consumer loan requests (of random amount and length) to gender-balanced prospective-borrowers who then randomly submitted them to a representative sample of loan-officers from Chilean banks. We find that loan requests submitted by women are 18.3% less likely to be approved,...

When evaluating observably similar loan applications from men and women, do loan officers favor men? This paper randomly assigned loan requests of variable amounts to a balanced sample of male and female prospective borrowers who then submitted the assigned loan requests to randomly assigned...