We empirically test for the presence of two types of financial contagion across large broker-dealers and dealer banks during the crisis of 2007-2009: the type based on the idea that market illiquidity mediates the spread of distress from one dealer to others, or, “liquidity contagion”, and...

Existing evidence suggests that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) may be beneficial to U.S. investors, but that foreign firms are perhaps less likely to list in the U.S. after SOX. This raises the question of whether foreign firms avoid listing in the U.S. after SOX because the Act imposes...

This paper investigates attitudes towards gender, ethnicity, weight, and age in the U.S. from peer-to-peer credit markets. With detailed data on both the lending decision and loan performance, we are substantially better able to distinguish between taste based discrimination consistent with...

This study examines empirically whether individuals consider their perceptions of potential counterparties' trustworthiness when deciding to transact in an environment with extensive contract enforcement mechanisms. This is a non-trivial empirical question because, as observed by Carlin,...

Frequently, economic theory places shape restrictions on functional relationships between economic variables. This paper develops a method to constrain the values of the first and second derivatives of nonparametric locally polynomial estimators. We apply this technique to estimate the state...

The common-factor hypothesis is one possible explanation for the housing wealth effect. Under this hypothesis, house price appreciation is related to changes in consumption as long as the available proxies for the common driver of housing and non-housing demand are noisy and housing supply is...

Recent empirical work suggests that a proxy for the probability of informed trading (PIN) is an important determinant of the cross-section of average returns. This paper examines whether PIN is priced because of information asymmetry or because of other liquidity effects that are unrelated to...