Journal of Corporate Finance Vol. 77 2022
Does marriage equality promote credit access? Evidence from same-sex marriage laws
open access
Abstract
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.
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2022.102315
- Volume
- 77
- Pages
- 102315
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref