A household’s vehicle purchases are among its largest expenditure outlays. Moreover, unlike housing purchases, which a typical household may make once or twice over a lifetime, a household may well buy several cars over the same interval. The magnitude and relative frequency of vehicle purchases suggest that differential treatment by race in the vehicle market may have important implications for differences in wealth and financial wellbeing by race. Yet, whereas a robust literature in economics has studied virtually all aspects of racial treatment in the housing market, corresponding work about vehicles has been relatively sparse, with most work focusing on racial differences in prices paid (Pinelopi Goldberg (1996) and Fiona Scott-Morton, Florian Zettelmeyer, and Jorge Silva-Risso (2003)). Very little previous attention has been paid to whether there is differential racial treatment in another important outcome in the vehicle market: the interest rates that households pay on the loans used to purchase vehicles.1 Calculations using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances indicate that loans for vehicle purchases are primarily obtained from one of two sources. Roughly two-thirds of vehicle loans originate from the traditional banking sector: commercial banks, savings institutions, or credit unions. Vehicle manufacturers finance the remaining one-third of auto

We investigate how demand conditions affect employers’ provision of safety—something about which theory is ambivalent. Positive demand shocks relax financial constraints that limit safety investment but simultaneously raise the opportunity cost of increasing safety rather than production. We study the US metals mining sector, leveraging exogenous demand shocks from short-term variation in global commodity prices. We find that positive price shocks substantially increase workplace injury rates and safety regulation noncompliance. While these results indicate the general dominance of the opportunity cost effect, shocks that only increase mines’ cash flow lower injury rates, illustrating that financial constraints also affect safety.