We find the Small Business Administration's disaster-relief home loan program denies significantly more loans in areas with larger shares of minorities, subprime borrowers, and higher income inequality. We find that risk-insensitive loan pricing -- a feature present in many regulated and...

The incidence of mis-selling, fraud, and poor customer service by retail banks is significantly higher in areas with higher proportions of poor and minority borrowers and in areas where government regulation promotes an increased quantity of lending. Specifically, low-to-moderate-income (LMI)...

Credit rating agencies emphasize the importance of specific financial ratio thresholds in their rating process. Firms below these thresholds are more likely to receive higher ratings than similar firms that are not. I show that firms near key Debt/EBITDA thresholds are significantly more likely...

Firms face difficult decisions regarding investment in the protection of nonfinancial stakeholders. We find that a firm's financial health plays an important role in mitigating the spread of COVID-19 by studying nursing homes, whose residents have accounted for about 40% of all U.S. COVID-19...

Using resume data on over 45 million U.S. workers, we find that the flow of employees between a pair of firms sharply drops by about 20% when the firms start to share a director on their boards. We find no trend prior to initiation, and the reduced flows persist throughout the overlapping...

We examine the relationship between customer wait times and future price inflation using cell- phone location data. We focus our analysis on restaurants in the U.S. over the years 2019–2021 and document a stark increase in abnormal wait times starting in mid-2020. At the MSA level, we find...