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Does marriage equality promote credit access? Evidence from same-sex marriage laws

Journal of Corporate Finance 2022 77, 102315 open access
We show that following the legalization of same-sex marriage across US states, mortgage applications from same-sex borrowers are more likely to be denied relative to a matched sample of different-sex borrowers. Our findings are robust to using a stacked regression design and several approaches to account for compositional changes in the pool of mortgage applicants around same-sex legalization. FinTech lenders, which rely less on human loan officers, experience no change in the denial gap. Our results highlight information frictions between loan officers and same-sex borrowers as one channel for the increased denial gap between same-sex and different-sex applications.