Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by constructing a large panel of BNPL...

We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers' creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform's model to counterfactual outcomes based on a...

Interest in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) has been burgeoning with 134 countries now exploring its implementation. In December 2022, India started its CBDC pilot program to continue its transition towards a digitized payments economy. This paper presents the first empirical analysis...

Despite positive and significant earnings announcement premia, we find that institutional investors reduce their exposure to stocks before earnings announcements. A novel result on the sensitivity of flows to individual stock returns provides a potential explanation. We show that extreme...

This paper uses transaction-level data across millions of accounts to identify cryptocurrency investors and evaluate how fluctuations in individual crypto wealth affect household consumption, equity investment, and local real estate markets. We estimate an MPC out of unrealized crypto gains that...

This paper studies how tightening monetary policy transmits to the economy through the mortgage market and sheds new light on the distributional consequences at both the individual and regional levels. We find that credit supply factors, specifically restrictions on the debt-to-income (DTI)...

We provide a first look into the drivers of household cryptocurrency investing. Analyzing consumer transaction data for millions of U.S. households, we find that, except for high income early adopters, cryptocurrency investors resemble the general population. These investors span all income...

We exploit an episode of plausibly-random debt discharge, due to the inability of National Collegiate to prove chain of title, to examine the effects of student debt relief on individual credit and labor market outcomes. We find that borrowers experiencing this debt relief shock reduce their...

Brokers continue to play a critical role in intermediating institutional stock market transactions. More than half of all institutional investor order flow is still executed by high-touch (non-electronic) brokers. Despite the continued importance of brokers, we have limited information on what...