Borrowers' housing equity is an important component of their wealth and a critical determinant of their vulnerability to shocks. In this paper, we create a unique data set that allows us to provide a comprehensive look at the ratio of housing debt to housing values - what we refer to as...

If a lender can easily obtain more information about a borrower, under what conditions will he choose to do so? In this paper, I use a hand-collected set of records from the nineteenth century credit reporting agency, R.G. Dun & Company, that allows me to directly observe when lenders acquired...