We document that the dispersion of failure risk across banks within a given region in the U.S. is greater in regions that have higher income inequality. We explain this pattern with a model based on risk shifting incentives where banks issue insured deposits and choose the riskiness of their...

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, a significant research effort has been made to better understand the links between household debt levels, financial stability risks, and the ongoing implications of the ‘debt overhang’ for economic growth. However, accurately measuring the...

Usury is a frequent occurrence in consumer credit markets and particularly affects low-income households. Although the term usury conjures images of a greedy individual consciously acting to exploit the weak bargaining position of another by deceitful and even fraudulent means, we consider it as...

Borrower-based macroprudential (MP) policies - such as caps on loan-to-value (LTV) ratios and debt-service-to-income (DSTI) limits - contain the build-up of systemic risk by reducing the probability and conditional impact of a crisis. While LTV/DSTI limits can increase inequality at...

Macroprudential regulators worldwide have introduced regulations to limit household leverage in light of existing evidence which suggests that high leverage is associated with household distress during crisis. We analyse the distributional effects of such a macroprudential policy on mortgage and...

Extensive research has confirmed that there is significant anchoring bias in purchase mortgage appraisals, with appraisers setting the value at or above the contract price the vast majority of the time. However, understanding appraisal bias in refinance mortgages has been significantly more...

Post-crisis policy interventions significantly increased the demand for mortgage refinancing, but there is an unexplored possibility that the surge in refinancing applications has crowded out the supply of credit to home buyers. In this paper, we examine two frictions that hamper financial...

Under-refinancing limits the transmission of accommodative monetary policy to the household sector and costs mortgage holders in many countries a significant fraction of income annually. We test whether targeted communication can reduce the attention frictions that inhibit transmission by...

This working paper is written by Vincent Yao (Georgia State University).Using automobile credit data, we study individual lenders' responses to monetary policy shocks and how they are a ected by local market power. We nd that all lenders, except new FinTech rms, respond to an increase in the...