Credit reports are used in nearly all consumer lending decisions and, increasingly, in hiring decisions in the labor market, but the impact of a bad credit report is largely unknown. We study the effects of credit reports on financial and labor market outcomes using a difference-in-differences...

This paper tests for bias in consumer lending decisions using administrative data from a high-cost lender in the United Kingdom. We motivate our analysis using a simple model of bias in lending, which predicts that profits should be identical for loan applicants from different groups at the...

This paper tests for bias in consumer lending using administrative data from a high-cost lender in the United Kingdom. We motivate our analysis using a new principal-agent model of bias, which predicts that profits should be higher for the most illiquid loan applicants at the margin if loan...