Extensive research has confirmed that there is significant anchoring bias in purchase mortgage appraisals, with appraisers setting the value at or above the contract price the vast majority of the time. However, understanding appraisal bias in refinance mortgages has been significantly more...

This paper studies how creditors behave under costly collateral enforcement. I exploit quasi-experimental variation in foreclosure costs generated from Maine's 2014 Greenleaf judgement. I estimate that that the foreclosure rate dropped by over 23%. Furthermore, I find that borrowers did not...

Using individual-level credit card data from a Singapore financial institution, this paper investigates the effectiveness of a consumer financial regulation aiming to reduce household unsecured debt accumulation. A threat of suspending all existing unsecured credit induces the credit card...

Credit score cutoff rules result in very similar potential borrowers being treated differently by mortgage lenders. Recent research has used variation induced by these rules to investigate the connection between securitization and lender moral hazard in the recent financial crisis. However, the...

In October 2006, Dominion Bond Rating Service (DBRS) introduced new ratings for banks that account for the potential of government support. The rating changes are not a reflection of any changes in the respective banks' credit fundamentals. We use this natural experiment to evaluate the...

This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in refinancing costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in refinancing costs is shown to be driven by spillover...

We exploit the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period to examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic stability in this period, we are able to isolate the...

We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model that distinguishes supervision from regulation and a novel dataset on work hours of Federal Reserve supervisors. We highlight the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of supervision and use the model to interpret the relationship...

In moral hazard models, bank shareholders have incentives to transfer wealth from the deposit insurer - that is, maximize put option value - by pursuing riskier strategies. For safe banks with large charter value, however, the risk-taking incentive is outweighed by the possibility of losing...