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Conference Paper
Are elite universities losing their competitive edge?
Adair Morse turns to the social sciences and analyzes how research productivity in top economics and finance programs has changed over time. She finds that the advantage of elite universities is declining and argues this is because new communications technologies have eroded the benefits of researcher co-location. Physical proximity to research colleagues is simply becoming less important, and this is reflected in a declining spillover effect for top programs.
Working Paper
Technological Innovation and Discrimination in Household Finance
Technology has changed how discrimination manifests itself in financial services. Replacing human discretion with algorithms in decision-making roles reduces taste-based discrimination, and new modeling techniques have expanded access to financial services to households who were previously excluded from these markets. However, algorithms can exhibit bias from human involvement in the development process, and their opacity and complexity can facilitate statistical discrimination inconsistent with antidiscrimination laws in several aspects of financial services provision, including advertising, ...
Working Paper
Auto Finance in the Electric Vehicle Transition
Financing cost differentials tilt the calculus for households toward electric vehicles (EVs). Using 85 million observations on U.S. auto loans, we study households’ credit risk by engine type, seek to uncover the sources and ask if credit risk differentials are being priced. We find that EV borrowers default 29% less relative to internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) borrowers with a back-of-the-envelope value of $1,457 in lender savings. To disentangle selection from expost exposure to differential costs of running an EV, we implement a differential shock exposure by treatment model of ...