I empirically analyze how changes in access to housing collateral affect homeowner borrowing behavior. To isolate the role of collateral constraints from that of wealth effects, I exploit the fully anticipated expiration of resale price controls on owner‐occupied housing in Montgomery County, Maryland. I estimate a marginal propensity to borrow out of housing collateral that ranges between $0.04 and $0.13 and is correlated with homeowners' initial leverage. Additional analysis of residential investment and ex‐post loan performance indicates that some of the extracted funds generated new expenditures. These results suggest a potentially important role for collateral constraints in driving household expenditures.

We test the asset pricing implications of collateralized borrowing (that is, of using assets as collateral to borrow money) in the laboratory. To this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model with collateral constraints amenable to laboratory implementation and gather experimental data. In the laboratory, assets that can be leveraged fetch higher prices than assets that cannot, even though assets' payoffs are identical in all states of the world. Collateral value, therefore, creates deviations from the Law of One Price. The spread between collateralizeable and noncollateralizeable assets is significant and quantitatively close to theoretical predictions.

We empirically explore the fragility of wholesale funding of banks, using transaction‐level data on short‐term, unsecured certificates of deposit in the European market. We do not observe a market‐wide freeze during the 2008 to 2014 period. Yet, many banks suddenly experience funding dry‐ups. Dry‐ups predict, but do not cause, future deterioration in bank performance. Furthermore, during periods of market stress, banks with high future performance tend to increase reliance on wholesale funding. We therefore fail to find evidence consistent with adverse selection models of funding market freezes. Our evidence is in line with theories highlighting heterogeneity between informed and uninformed lenders.

A contrast effect occurs when the value of a previously observed signal inversely biases perception of the next signal. We present the first evidence that contrast effects can distort prices in sophisticated and liquid markets. Investors mistakenly perceive earnings news today as more impressive if yesterday's earnings surprise was bad and less impressive if yesterday's surprise was good. A unique advantage of our financial setting is that we can identify contrast effects as an error in perceptions rather than expectations. Finally, we show that our results cannot be explained by an alternative explanation involving information transmission from previous earnings announcements.

This paper investigates the mechanisms behind the matching of banks and firms in the loan market and the implications of this matching for lending relationships, bank capital, and credit provision. I find that bank‐dependent firms borrow from well‐capitalized banks, while firms with access to the bond market borrow from banks with less capital. This matching of bank‐dependent firms with stable banks smooths cyclicality in aggregate credit provision and mitigates the effects of bank shocks on the real economy.

For years, online retailers have maintained a price advantage over brick‐and‐mortar retailers by not collecting sales tax at the time of sale. Recently, several states have required that online retailer Amazon collect sales tax during checkout. Using transaction‐level data, we document that households living in these states reduced their Amazon purchases by 9.4% following the implementation of the sales tax laws, implying elasticities of –1.2 to –1.4. The effect is stronger for large purchases, where purchases declined by 29.1%, corresponding to an elasticity of –3.9. Studying competitors in the electronics field, we find some evidence of substitution toward competing retailers.

We investigate whether a model with time‐varying probability of economic disaster can explain prices of collateralized debt obligations. We focus on senior tranches of the CDX, an index of credit default swaps on investment grade firms. These assets do not incur losses until a large fraction of previously stable firms default, and thus are deep out‐of‐the money put options on the overall economy. When calibrated to consumption data and to the equity premium, the model explains the spreads on CDX tranches prior to and during the 2008 to 2009 crisis.

Using a novel data set of U.S. financial advisors that includes individuals' employment histories and misconduct records, we show that coworkers influence an individual's propensity to commit financial misconduct. We identify coworkers' effect on misconduct using changes in coworkers caused by mergers of financial advisory firms. The tests include merger‐firm fixed effects to exploit the variation in changes to coworkers across branches of the same firm. The probability of an advisor committing misconduct increases if his new coworkers, encountered in the merger, have a history of misconduct. This effect is stronger between demographically similar coworkers.

We characterize the optimal default fund in a defined contribution (DC) pension plan. Using detailed data on individuals' holdings inside and outside the pension system, we find substantial heterogeneity within and between passive and active investors in terms of labor income, financial wealth, and stock market participation. We build a life‐cycle consumption‐savings model, with a DC pension account and an opt‐out/default choice, that produces realistic investor heterogeneity. Relative to a common age‐based allocation, implementing the optimal default asset allocation implies a welfare gain of 1.5% during retirement. Much of the gain is attainable with a simple rule of thumb.