Working Papers
The Male and Female Gap in Home Appraisals - with Joshua Bosshardt and Simi Kedia
- AFA Annual Meeting, Jan 2026
-2025 AREUEA National conference, Washington DC, May 2025
Using refinance mortgages, we find that homes of single female homeowners are appraised for 2.4% less than those of single men. The gap is narrower when borrowers have unisex names and when appraisers have a greater exposure to single female homeowners. The lower appraisal values of single female households are associated with higher interest rates, lower loan amounts and lower cash-out amounts in refinancing.
Do Local Bank Branches Shape Mortgage Origination? - with Janet Gao and Yufeng Wu
-Western Finance Association Annual Meeting, Jun 2024
-Midwest Finance Association Annual Meeting, Mar 2024
-American University, CEMFI, George Mason University, The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, University of Florida, University of South Carolina, FDIC Bank Research Conference (2023)
Do banks delegate their mortgage lending decisions to local branches? Using a novel dataset that contains bank branch managers' career histories, we find that the managers' past mortgage approval and pricing decisions have persistent influence on their subsequent lending standards even after they switch employments across firms and locations. Managers' past experience also influences how they passthrough monetary policy shocks at current branches.
Credit Union Expansions: A Fork in the Road for Local Banks? - with Jiakai Chen, Rodney Ramcharan, and Teng Wang
-AFA Annual Meeting, Jan 2026
-FDIC Bank Research Conference, Sep 2025
-AREUEA International Conference, Jul 2025
-Credit Union Research Workshop (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Jan 2025
-Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Oct 2024 (semifinalist for best paper award)
-2024 Community Banking Research Conference, Oct 2024
-IBEFA, Seattle WA, Jul 2024
-Federal Reserve Board, Federal Reserve System Committee Meeting on Banking, UTSA, University of Wyoming
We show that the credit union expansion exacerbates the trend of large banks exiting rural and low-income areas, and in the meantime, credit unions fill the void left by large banks and extend credit to underserved communities. Overtime, credit markets become geographically segmented without sacrificing lending efficiency.
Small Mortgages and the Rise of FinTech and Shadow Banks - with Yongqiang Chu and David Zhang
-2024 APPAM Research Conference Panelist, National Harbor, MD, Nov 2024
-2024 AREUEA National conference, Washington DC, May 2024
-The Mortgage Market Research Conference poster (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), May 2024
We find that areas more exposed to FinTech and shadow bank growth have significantly higher small mortgage denial rates. Our results suggest that the rise of FinTech and shadow banks plays a role in the declining availability of small mortgages, potentially contributing to lower homeownership rates among less affluent households.
Bank Local Mortgage Exposure and Corporate Lending Decision - with Jakub Hajda, Luca Lin, and Xinyan Yan
-2025 AREUEA National conference, Washington DC, May 2025
We show that banks are more likely to extend credit to a firm located in a market where the bank has a larger mortgage exposure. Our results are robust after controlling for the bank's local information and economic trends. Our findings suggest that banks internalize cross-asset externalities when making corporate lending decisions.
Monetary Policy and Bank Concentration - with Yongqiang Chu
-Financial Regulations & Technology Conference, Apr 2022
-Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Oct 2021
We view the structure of the banking sector as endogenous to changes in monetary policy and show that when the policy rate rises, banks operating in more competitive markets are more likely to be acquired or fail outright, leading to a more consolidated banking sector over time. Consistent with the market power channel, we find that the effect is driven by banks' inability to pass on rate hikes to the asset side and being forced to pass on rate hikes to the liability side in competitive markets.
Ethical Dilemmas: Corporate Response and Market Reaction to the Russia-Ukraine War - with Lixin Huang, Harley E. Ryan, and Lingling Wang
-Midwest Finance Association Annual Meeting, Mar 2025
-Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Oct 2024 (semifinalist for best paper award)
-Adam Smith Sustainability Conference, Aug 2024
-Conference on Finance for the Common Good, Aug 2024
-Loyola University Maryland Financial Ethics Conference, May 2024
-UConn, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, Sep 2023
We use the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a context to understand how firm managers cope with ethical dilemmas and how the stock market reacts to the firms’ decisions. Our findings indicate that investors recognize firm managers’ ethical considerations and internalize them in stock prices.
Global Diversification with Local Stocks: A Road Less Traveled - with Cheol Eun, Soohun Kim, and Fengrong Wei
-Georgia Institute of Technology, KAIST, Seoul National University, Waseda University
In contrast to the prior view that global diversification benefits have significantly decayed with a rising co-movement of international stock markets, we show that investors can still significantly benefit from global diversification even within the realm of developed markets. The primary source lies in stark heterogeneity in global integration at the firm-level, which can be viewed as the "local factor". Our results show that prior literature greatly understates the potential benefits that world markets can provide.
Selected Publications
Political Influence and Banks: Evidence from Mortgage Lending - with Yongqiang Chu Journal of Financial Intermediation, 52, 100982, 2022.
Uniform Mortgage Regulation and Distortion in Capital Allocation Review of Finance, 26(4), 1011-1050, 2022.
House Price Growth Synchronization and Business Cycle Alignment - with Cheol Eun and Lingling Wang Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 1-36, 2021.