Using administrative account level data, we study the largest financial inclusion program in India that led to 255 million new bank account openings. About 77% of these accounts maintain a positive balance. While the initial usage remains quite infrequent, it gradually converges to that of...

We utilize the introduction of a mobile payment technology by the largest bank in Singapore in 2017 to study how mobile payment technology reshapes economic activities and stimulates business creation. After the introduction, business-to-consumer industries witnessed a higher growth rate of...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

Using several large data sets of mortgage loans originated between 2004 and 2007, we find that in the prime mortgage market, banks generally sold low-default-risk loans into the secondary market while retaining higher-default-risk loans in their portfolios. In contrast, these lenders retained...

To understand better the role of loan officers' incentives in the origins of the financial crisis, we study a controlled field experiment conducted by a large bank. In the experiment, the incentive structure of a subset of small business loan officers was altered from fixed salary to...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

Financially-constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. The average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged transactions, and for...

We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example features the optimal use of credit cards for convenience transactions after a balance transfer and the second involves a financial mistake on...