In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan...

This paper examines why unsolicited ratings tend to be lower than solicited ratings. Both self-selection among issuers and strategic conservatism of rating agencies may be reasonable explanations. Analyses of default incidences of non-U.S. borrowers between January 1996 and December 2006 show...

We exploit the quasi-random assignment of borrowers to loan officers using data from a large Albanian lender to show that own-gender preferences affect both credit supply and demand. Borrowers matched to officers of the opposite sex are less likely to return for a second loan. The effect is...