We document the unique structure of the peer-to-peer lending market. Originally designed as decentralized, the market has become highly, but not fully, reintermediated. The platforms’ software now performs essentially all tasks related to loan evaluation, whereas most lenders are passive and automatically fund most applications on offer. Yet unlike banks, and in contrast to theories predicting full reintermediation, the platforms provide detailed loan information, and some active loan pickers coexist with passive investors. We argue that while intermediation attracts unsophisticated passive investors, transparency in the presence of active investors resolves the lending platform’s moral hazard problem inherent in intermediated markets.

We study the valuation of collateral by comparing spreads on loans by the same bank, to the same borrower, at the same origination date, but backed by different types of collateral. Pledging collateral reduces borrowing costs by 23 BPS on average. The effect varies across different types of collateral, with marketable securities being most valuable, and real estate and accounts receivables and inventory being more valuable than fixed assets and a blanket lien. Further, the rate reduction from pledging collateral is sensitive to the value of the underlying collateral, and collateral tends to be more valuable for smaller and private firms and for loans with longer maturity.

We examine how broad changes in work arrangements and lifestyles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have affected households’ location decisions. Using data on over 360,000 residential, interstate moves over the last 5 years, we find that more than 12% of moves were directly influenced by the pandemic. Among pandemic-influenced movers, over 15% of households cite that remote work influenced their move. Lifestyle-related (job-related) migration increased (decreased) significantly, particularly for the set of households who are likely to have access to remote work. We further find that these changes in migration patterns are positively related to post-pandemic economic growth.

We find that mortgage loans originated after the adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD; a mechanism discouraging loan officers’ labor mobility) have a lower default probability, a higher loan modification rate, and a lower foreclosure rate. These effects are unaccompanied by any reduction in loan supply and contribute to more stable housing prices. Using the adoption of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act as an alternative identification generates consistent results. Overall, our findings suggest that restricting loan officers’ labor mobility leads to better ex ante screening and ex post monitoring, improving the origination efficiency for U.S. residential mortgage loans.

During the first half of 2020, the difference in savings from mortgage refinancing between high- and low-income borrowers was 10 times higher than before. This was the result of two factors: high-income borrowers increased their refinancing activity more than otherwise comparable low-income borrowers and, conditional on refinancing, they captured slightly larger improvements in interest rates. Refinancing inequality increases with the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and is characterized by an underrepresentation of low-income borrowers in the pool of applications. We estimate a difference of $5 billion in savings between the top income quintile and the rest of the market.

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released a database of consumer complaints about banks’ financial products to the public since 2013. We find a greater reduction in mortgage applications to banks that receive more mortgage complaints in local markets after the disclosures. The effect is stronger in areas with more sophisticated consumers and higher credit competition, and for banks receiving more severe complaints. The number of monthly mortgage complaints per bank exhibits faster mean reversion after the publication of the database. These findings suggest that the public disclosure of mortgage complaints enhances product market discipline and consumer financial protection.

This article studies how the rise of financial technology (Fintech) lending affects credit access, interest rates, and social welfare. We consider a lending competition model with two incumbent banks and a Fintech lender, which use different information and technologies to assess borrower creditworthiness. We show that Fintech lending could negatively affect high-quality borrowers’ access to credit when the Fintech lender’s screening accuracy is superior to that of the banks. Furthermore, Fintech lending may worsen the allocative efficiency of credit and reduce social welfare under some conditions. Analytical and numerical results suggest that Fintech lending mostly reduces the expected interest rates.

I show that an alignment in partisan affiliation, between a firm’s management and the president, is associated with higher levels of investment. Using insider trading data, I find that managers become more optimistic about their companies’ prospects when their preferred party is in power. This optimism-driven increase in investment is amplified by herding and associated with both lower profitability and stock returns. Overall, managers’ political beliefs produce heterogeneous expectations about future cash flows and distort investment decisions.

This article argues that corporate financial frictions can have an adverse effect on employee mental health, an important determinant of employee productivity. To identify the causal effects of financial frictions, we exploit variation in firms’ need to refinance their long-term debt in 2008, a period when refinancing became more difficult due to the credit crunch. Using administrative microdata, we find that antidepressant use grows significantly more among employees of firms in higher need of debt refinancing. Much of this effect occurs at employees keeping their jobs, pointing to decreased perceptions of job security as a transmission channel.

Is there a trade-off between the short-run and long-run real effects of monetary policy “leaning against the wind”? We provide novel evidence on this question from the United States in 1920–1921. Our identification strategy exploits county-level variation in access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window, and hand-collected data on banking and agriculture in Illinois. In the short term, tightened conditions at the discount window decreased bank lending and lowered crop prices and farm revenues. In the long term, however, they lowered debt-to-output levels and led to greater farmland utilization, suggesting an avoidance of debt overhang problems.

We use the 2015 Chinese stock market crash to study the effects of government stock purchases. The Chinese government purchased stocks to stabilize the markets through state-owned financial institutions known as the “National Team.” We find that the intervention led to reduced volatility and price informativeness. These impacts are driven by the disclosure of government portfolios. Consistent with investors having a stronger incentive to acquire government intervention information instead of fundamental news, we find reduced information production and information asymmetry following intervention disclosure. The article suggests that government stock purchases involve a trade-off between stability and informational efficiency.

Adverse market events can affect credit supply not only by hurting financial fundamentals but also by changing the risk-taking behaviors of individual decision-makers. We provide micro-level evidence of this individual decision-making channel in the U.S. mortgage market. We find that mortgage application rejection rates are more sensitive to foreclosure intensity when loan officers are more exposed to foreclosure news, despite the same housing market and bank fundamentals. Loans originated from the affected branches have lower ex post default rates, consistent with higher lending standards being applied. In the aggregate, this effect results in tighter credit supply during housing market downturns.

It is well documented that since at least the 1970s investment-cash flow (I-CF) sensitivity has been decreasing over time to disappear almost completely by the late 2000s. Based on a neoclassical investment model with costly external financing, we show that this pattern can be explained by the gradual increase of capital adjustment costs, attributable to the accumulation of knowledge capital. The result is robust to a variety of approaches, including Euler equation estimation and the simulated method of moments. More generally, our findings demonstrate that I-CF sensitivity should only be interpreted as a joint measure of financial and real frictions.

We study how patenting enhances customer capital and creates financial value in a product market characterized by information asymmetry between firm insiders and customers. We find that firms with more and higher quality patents develop greater customer capital, as measured by more positive customer perceptions of product novelty and quality. To establish causality, we exploit the exogenous variation in the random assignment of patent examiners to review applications and use the average examiner leniency as an instrument for patent grants. Our mediation analysis documents a positive impact of patenting on firm performance and financial market valuation through enhanced customer capital.

We study household credit responses to Hurricane Harvey using new, geographically granular data on credit cards, mortgages, and flooding. Estimates from a differences-in-differences design that exploits the flooding gradient show that affected households only borrow at low-interest rates, often using promotional (zero interest) cards and that they quickly pay down balances. We also document that take-up of forbearance (borrowing by missing mortgage payments without penalty) increases with flooding. These results are attenuated in floodplains, particularly in structures subject by code to physical hardening. Our results indicate that credit acts as a substitute for the lack of physical hardening.