Using US Supreme Court’s narrow-decision on Shelby v. Holder as a shock that diluted voting rights of Black Americans in covered counties, we document the relationship between political voice and economic decision-making. We show fewer Black Americans buy homes after their de-facto disenfranchisement, reflected through lower mortgage applications. Among those who apply for mortgages, there is a flight to Black lenders. Leveraging individual-level survey data, we show confidence in government and financial institutions plays a significant role in driving these effects. Our findings demonstrate that the effects of disenfranchisement extend beyond the ballot box to fundamental economic decisions like homeownership.

How large is the effect of bank credit supply on aggregate economic growth, and how much of it can cross-sectional estimates recover? We document a new fact about bank funding: on average, a single county accounts for approximately 30% of a bank's deposits. We exploit this geographic concentration by interacting local disasters with banks' deposit shares to construct funding shocks. Using the same underlying variation, we estimate a regional credit-supply elasticity of 0.088 and measure the aggregate lending and output responses. The regional loan-quantity channel accounts for only 9% of the aggregate output response. The remaining 91% captures aggregate adjustment outside the channel identified regionally. Our results show that well-identified regional credit-supply effects may account for only a small share of the aggregate response to the underlying shock.

Mortgage policies influence household borrowing and house prices not only through their mechanical effects on borrowing constraints, but also through their direct effects on house price expectations. For identification, we exploit unique settings in South Korea where the housing market separates into expectation-sensitive and credit-constrained areas, and where there exists speculative private debt that is unaffected by mortgage policies. Following a major relaxation of LTV/PTI limits that signaled a more supportive government stance toward housing markets, house prices rose sharply in expectation-sensitive districts rather than credit-constrained ones, with the response beginning even before the new limits took effect. The private debt also surged in these districts, driven by landlords' speculative housing investment, confirming that expectations drove housing investment independently of credit constraint changes. These findings imply that the effectiveness of mortgage policy depends not only on the credit constraints it sets, but also on the signals it sends to markets.

Informed landlords adjust rent more flexibly to expand their market share, fueling rent inflation. They secure a 0.5% higher annual rental income through an additional 0.3% rent adjustment, regardless of whether the market is in a downturn or recovery. In volatile periods, this advantage grows further: they achieve a 1.7% higher annual income through an additional 0.8% rent adjustment. Although frictions in rent adjustments contribute to these outcomes, they do not fully explain the pricing patterns observed among informed landlords—pricing expertise is key. These findings suggest that informed institutional landlords lead the rental market through flexible pricing strategies, and market volatility disproportionately challenges uninformed mom-and-pop landlords, who make up the majority of the rental market.

When central banks loosen monetary policy, credit availability increases, generating upwards pressure on asset prices. This paper analyzes the "credit channel" of monetary policy transmission in a unique institutional setting: the Chonsei system in the Korean housing market, in which rental tenants make interest-free loans to landlords in exchange for paying no rent. We show that, as Chonsei interest rates approach zero, the size of Chonsei loans grows unboundedly, exerting strong upwards pressure on house prices. We verify the model’s predictions empirically. Calibrating the model to the data, we find that a simple policy – imposing a proportional tax on Chonsei deposits – can substantially dampen the passthrough of interest rate changes to deposit size and house prices, providing potential benefits for financial stability.