We provide evidence that a firm's exposure to industry downturns, what we refer to as industry risk, is an important factor affecting ex post recovery rates and ex ante bank loan pricing and the borrowing firms use of cash. The basic idea is that if it is costly to redeploy industry assets, then...

Economically intuitive macroeconomic factors and borrower characteristics predict peer-to-peer loan defaults beyond what proprietary algorithms predict. Using county-level unemployment data, we find that loans originated in high unemployment areas are more likely to default. In addition, we...

Past studies document that incentive conflicts may lead issuer-paid credit rating agencies to provide optimistically-biased ratings. In this paper, we present evidence that investors question the quality of issuer-paid ratings and raise corporate bond yields where the issuer-paid rating is more...

Recent studies use retrospective automated valuation models (AVMs) to investigate whether appraisals of collateral values associated with securitized residential mortgage loans were systematically inflated during the recent housing boom. In this paper, we provide evidence that high AVM pricing...