The consequences of providing public funds to financial institutions remain controversial. We examine the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund’s impact on credit union activity, using hitherto little studied U.S. Treasury data. The CDFI Fund grants increase lending at credit unions by 3%. For every dollar awarded, 45 additional cents are loaned out to borrowers in the first year, and up to an additional $1.60 is loaned out within three years. Delinquent loan rates also increase slightly. Our panel results are supported by a broadband regression discontinuity analysis. Politics does not seem to play a role in allocating funding.

Multi-market banks reallocate capital when local credit demand increases after natural disasters. Using property damage as an instrument for lending growth, we find credit in unaffected but connected markets declines by a little less than 50 cents per dollar of additional lending in shocked areas. However, banks shield their core markets because most of the decline comes from loans in areas where banks do not own branches. Moreover, banks increase sales of more-liquid loans and they bid up the rate on deposits in the connected markets. These actions help lessen the impact of the demand shock on credit supply.

Using daily fluctuations in local sunshine as an instrument for sentiment, we study its effect on day-to-day decisions of lower-level financial officers. Positive sentiment is associated with higher credit approvals, and negative sentiment has the opposite effect of a larger magnitude. These effects are stronger when financial decisions require more discretion, when reviews are less automated, and when capital constraints are less binding. The variation in approval rates affects ex post financial performance and produces significant real effects. Our analysis of the economic channels suggests that sentiment influences managers' risk tolerance and subjective judgment.

In the Australian real estate market, about a third of properties are sold at auction. Properties that fail auctions sell later for a 1.3 percent discount. Consistent with a causal channel, the effect holds with property-level fixed effects and when auction failure is instrumented by adverse weather or seller overvaluation. Prices cluster below round numbers, and the discount fades over time, inconsistent with our effects reflecting unobserved property characteristics. The evidence suggests that there are behavioral factors affecting the valuations of buyers and sellers.

Over the past fifteen years, eleven states have restricted employers' access to the credit reports of job applicants. We estimate that county-level job vacancies have fallen by 5.5% in occupations affected by these laws relative to exempt occupations in the same counties and national-level vacancies for the same occupations. Cross-sectional heterogeneity suggests that employers use credit reports as signals of a worker's ability to perform the job: vacancies fall more in counties with a large share of subprime residents and less for occupations with other commonly available signals. Vacancies fall most for occupations involving routine tasks, suggesting that credit reports contain information relevant for these types of jobs.

Post-crisis stress tests have altered banks’ credit supply to small business. Banks most affected by stress tests reallocate credit away from riskier markets and toward safer ones. They also raise interest rates on small loans. Quantities fall most in high-risk markets where stress-tested banks own no branches, and prices rise mainly where they do. The results suggest that banks price the stress-test induced increase in capital requirements where they have local knowledge, and exit where they do not. Stress tests do not, however, reduce aggregate credit. Small banks seem to increase their share in geographies formerly reliant on stress-tested lenders.