We study a specific practice of predatory lending: Borrowers being rejected and approved in rapid succession by the same lender. We show that in such cases borrower and contract characteristics and ex post performance are consistent with predatory steering. Steered borrowers are associated with groups with lower financial sophistication. They are more likely to enter non-amortizing contracts with high profit margins that are quickly securitized. Steered borrowers default less in boom years when refinancing is easy. However, their performance deteriorates sharply once falling prices trap them in contracts with rising payments, reflecting the long-term costs of predatory lending.

We examine a link between bond exchange-traded fund (ETF) creation and redemption processes and the underlying bond market liquidity. Using daily creation and redemption data, we find that including a bond in a creation or redemption basket has a favorable impact on the bond’s liquidity for both high-yield and investment-grade markets. The improvement in liquidity persists during times of market stress with this impact being stronger for redemptions than creations. Our results suggest that ETF mispricing arbitrage explains the improvement in bond liquidity. However, we also find evidence that transaction costs and bond inventory management limit the ETF arbitrage.

The growing popularity of home-sharing platforms such as Airbnb, partly fueled by hosts’ ability to evade local taxes and regulations, has been shown to elevate housing costs by reallocating long-term housing units to the short-term rental market. This study assesses whether enhanced tax enforcement can mitigate this trend. We analyze staggered tax collection agreements between Airbnb and Florida counties, wherein Airbnb collects taxes from the hosts directly. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find these agreements significantly slow the growth of housing costs, highlighting the importance of tax policy in addressing the sharing economy’s influence on housing affordability.