Abstract This paper examines racial disparities in mortgage processing time prior to the global financial crisis. We find that Black borrowers are underrepresented and experience a longer than white among mortgages securitized by government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). At same time, borrower overrepresented face similar privately (PLS) mortgages. Additionally, strongly associated with faster s...

This paper examines the extent to which financial development and financial structure may explain cross-country diffusion of information communication technology (ICT). Using panel data for 76 emerging and advanced countries for the period 1990–2003, it finds that credit and stock market development tends to foster ICT diffusion, but financial structure does not appear to have any significant r...

Pension Plan Characteristics and Framing Effects in Employee Savings Behavior In this paper we document the importance of framing effects in the retirement savings decisions of college professors. Pensions in many post-secondary institutions are funded by a combination of an employer contribution and a mandatory employee contribution. Employees can also make tax-deferred contributions to a supp...

Using payday-lender administrative data matched to borrower credit attributes from a national credit bureau, I find that borrowers who engage in protracted refinancing (“rollover”) activity have better financial outcomes (measured by changes in credit scores) than consumers whose borrowing is limited to shorter periods. These results are robust to an alternative definition of a “rollover” that ...

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms’ cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models...

In this paper, we examine the risk characteristics and capital adequacy of hedge funds using Value-at-Risk (based on Extreme Value Theory) as the criterion for measuring risk and estimating capital requirements. Using extensive data on nearly thirteen hundred live and dead hedge funds, we find that the vast majority of funds are adequately capitalized. In addition, a large fraction of hedge fun...

This study examines the relationship between the life insurance and economic growth in India. The total life insurance premium (TLIP), and total life insurance investment (TLII), are used as proxy for life insurance and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is used for the economic growth. The data has been compiled from the Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics, IRDA annual reports and economic surve...

The Journal of Economic Literature codes classification system (JEL) published by the American Association (AEA) is de facto standard for research literature in economics. JEL used to classify articles, dissertations, books, book reviews, and working papers EconLit, a database maintained AEA. Over time, it has evolved extended with over 850 subclasses. This paper reviews history development sys...

This paper presents a new method to examine the performance evaluation of mutual funds in incomplete markets. Based on the no arbitrage condition, we develop bounds on admissible performance measures. We suggest new ways of ranking mutual funds and provide a diagnostic instrument for evaluating the admissibility of candidate performance measures. Using monthly data from 1984 to 1997, we show th...

Increased concern for the environment has increased the number of investment opportunities in mutual funds specialized in promoting responsible environmental attitudes. This paper examines the performance and risk sensitivities of US green mutual funds vis-à-vis their conventional peers. We also analyze and compare this performance relative to other Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) mutual f...