We find that firms' financial resources play an important role in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. We study nursing homes -- whose residents account for over one-third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths -- at a time when investment in risk mitigation was costly and critical. Facilities with less liquidity and those experiencing more severe cash flow shocks had more cases of COVID-19. The importance of cash flow is further supported by tests exploiting state-level variation in Medicaid reimbursement expansion. Evidence on personal protective equipment supplies suggests a lack of financial resources leads to lower investment in risk mitigation.

Amid the emerging dominance of nonbanks, small banks use key financing advantages to persist in the mortgage market. We provide evidence on the heterogeneous impact of two shocks to the supply of mortgage credit: post-crisis regulatory burden and GSE financing cost changes. Small banks exploit disproportionate regulation on the largest four banks (Big4) and their ability to lend on balance sheet to strongly substitute for the retreating Big4. The erasure of guarantee fee (g-fee) discounts for large lenders facilitates small bank growth in GSE lending. Small banks also grow balance sheet loans in areas more exposed to g-fee hikes.

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) areas targeted by the Community Reinvestment Act have significantly worse outcomes, and this effect is larger for LMI areas with a high-minority population share. The results highlight an unintended adverse consequence of such quantity-focused regulations on the quality of credit to lower-income and minority customers.

We show that banks significantly under-report the risk in their trading book when they have lower equity capital. Specifically, a decrease in a bank's equity capital results in substantially more violations of its self-reported risk levels in the following quarter. The under-reporting is especially high during the critical periods of high systemic risk and for banks with larger trading operations. We exploit a discontinuity in the expected benefit of under-reporting present in Basel regulations to provide further support for a causal link between  capital-saving incentives and under-reporting. Overall, we show that banks' self-reported risk measures  become least informative precisely when they matter the most.

We study the key drivers of security design in the residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) market during the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. We show that deals with a higher level of equity tranche have a significantly lower delinquency rate that cannot be explained away by the underlying loan pool's observable credit risk factors. The effect is concentrated within pools with a higher likelihood of asymmetric information between deal sponsors and potential buyers of the securities. Further, securities that are sold from high-equity-tranche deals command higher prices conditional on their credit ratings. Overall our results show that the goal of security design in this market was not only to exploit regulatory arbitrage, but also to mitigate information frictions that were pervasive in this market.

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 government-run lending programs -- is a primary driver of these disparities in access to credit. We show the differences in denial rates are disproportionately high compared to counterfactual both private-market and government-insured risk-sensitive loan pricing programs. Thus, despite ensuring "fair" prices, the use of risk-insensitive pricing may lead to "unfair" access to credit. 

Nonbank mortgage companies (NMCs) use high levels of short-term leverage, leading to concerns about their individual fragility and systemic risk. We find that NMCs also hold very risky assets, with revenue growth ranging from -30% to +100% at the 10th-90th percentile. Surprisingly, we also observe extremely low bankruptcy rates. We address this puzzle by examining the dynamics of NMCs' costs following negative shocks. Our findings show that NMCs have the flexibility to quickly and substantially reduce both their operating expenses and financing costs (interest expense and debt levels). These dynamics lower their credit risk compared to what static measures of leverage and asset risk suggest. The collateralized nature of originators' borrowing plays a fundamental role in debt flexibility. Servicers, who lack high-quality collateral, compensate by holding more cash.

We study the significant migration of labor into the real estate agent occupation (REA) during the early 2000s and examine the long-run career path outcomes for those that enter. We show large flows of workers into realty from virtually all parts of the skill, wage, and education spectrums during the run-up. We find those entering REA in MSAs with house price bubbles end up in jobs paying significantly less in the long-run as compared to REA entrants in non-bubble areas from the same occupation and with the same education-level. Even in 2017 when house prices and employment return to their pre-crisis levels, REA entrants in Bubble MSAs are in occupations earning about 11% less. 

We use individual-level data to quantify the effect of getting a mortgage on non-mortgage credit outcomes. We use a regression discontinuity design and find that individuals that transition to homeownership increase their credit card and auto balances by $8,300 and $14,800, suggesting a debt spillover effect from home ownership. This increase in debt is equivalent to 13% of the average mortgage loan, and we provide evidence that it is mainly driven by a change in credit demand. We find that this increase in debt is driven by individuals with higher financial experience, while their overall ability to service their debt remains unchanged. In contrast, low-experience individuals do not increase their debt, but are relatively more likely to experience a deterioration in their financial health. Taken together, these results highlight the role financial experience plays in managing the debt burden associated to a new home.

This paper examines how good borrowers use the design of performance sensitive debt contracts to alleviate financial constraints. I show that borrowers use a convex pricing grid (i.e., a contract where the increase in the loan spread following a decline in performance exceeds the decrease in the spread following a performance improvement) to signal their unobservable creditworthiness and receive better bank loan terms. I find that constrained firms that use convex pricing grids receive loans that are 21-28% larger with a spread that is 31-37 basis points lower than observationally similar borrowers that use fixed spread loans. Consistent with the notion that a costly signal should positively correlate with future financial health, I find that constrained borrowers that use a loan with a convex pricing grid are one third less likely to experience financial distress during the term of their loans.