Does marriage equality promote credit access? Evidence from same-sex marriage laws

TY - JOUR

T1 - Does marriage equality promote credit access? Evidence from same-sex marriage laws

AU - Hagendorff, Jens

AU - Nguyen, Duc Duy

AU - Sila, Ben

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors

PY - 2022/12

Y1 - 2022/12

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141963771&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2022.102315

DO - 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2022.102315

M3 - Article

SN - 0929-1199

VL - 77

JO - Journal of Corporate Finance

JF - Journal of Corporate Finance

M1 - 102315

ER -