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

Jens Hagendorff*, Duc Duy Nguyen, Vathunyoo Sila

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

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.
Original languageEnglish
Article number102315
Number of pages23
JournalJournal of Corporate Finance
Volume77
Early online date12 Nov 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2022

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • banks
  • mortgages
  • same-sex marriage

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