Poor loan quality is often attributed to loan officers exercising poor judgment. A potential solution is to base loans on hard information alone. However, we find other consequences of bypassing discretion stemming from loan officer incentives and limits of hard information verifiability. Using...

We analyze the information content of the digital footprint – information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website – for predicting consumer default. Using more than 250,000 observations, we show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital...

We analyze the information content of the digital footprint – information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website – for predicting consumer default. We show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital footprint match the information content...

We analyze the information content of the digital footprint – information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website – for predicting consumer default. Using more than 250,000 observations, we show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital...

We analyze the information content of the digital footprint - information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website - for predicting consumer default. Using more than 250,000 observations, we show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital...

Poor loan quality is often attributed to loan officers exercising poor judgment. A potential solution is to base loans on hard information alone. However, we find other consequences of bypassing discretion stemming from loan officer incentives and limits of hard information verifiability. Using...