Using bank administrative data on entrepreneurs’ personal and business activities, we show that an entrepreneur’s personal behaviors, which are revealed from personal consumption, finance, and credit activities, can well predict the future credit outcome of her business. Utilizing advanced...

Using proprietary loan screening data, we document that loan officers engage in “attention discrimination”: they exert less effort reviewing ex-ante disadvantage applicants, leading to higher rejection rates than otherwise justified by those applicants’ credit quality. Attention...

Why did banks experience massive deposit inflows during the first months of the pandemic? Using weekly branch-level data on interest rates and county-level data on COVID-19 cases, we discover that interest rates at bank branches in counties with higher COVID-19 infection rates fell by more than...

We study how consumers trade off digital versus in-person banking services and how consumer demand impacts bank technology choices. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as a laboratory, where pandemic risk raised the cost of in-person bank services. After the cost of in-person banking rises, customers,...

We evaluate how a positive, technology-driven shock to bank liquidity affects small business dynamics across different size distributions. We first show that banks receiving positive liquidity shocks increase lending to relatively larger SMEs, not to the smallest firms. This finding is...

What is the impact of regulatory reforms that enhance credit market efficiency on children’s human capital? Using a parent-child panel dataset, we find that such reforms reduced children’s academic performance in low-income families. Consistent with the view that financial development...

We study the relationship between banks' IT capabilities and their ability to serve customers during the demand shock for digital banking services generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid mobility restrictions, banks with better IT experience larger reductions in physical branch visits and...

This article examines the relation between a borrowing firm's ownership structure and its choice of debt source using a novel data set on corporate ownership, control, and debt structures for 9,831 firms in 20 countries from 2001 to 2010. We find that the divergence between the control rights...