Does Marriage Equality Promote Credit Access? Evidence from Same-sex Marriage Laws

Hagendorff, J.; Nguyen, D.D.; Sila, V.

Abstract

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 samesex 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.

Citation

Hagendorff, J., Nguyen, D., & Sila, V. (2022). Does Marriage Equality Promote Credit Access? Evidence from Same-sex Marriage Laws. Journal of Corporate Finance, 77, Article 102315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2022.102315

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 24, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Nov 12, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022-12
• Deposit Date: Oct 24, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 4, 2023
• Journal: Journal of Corporate Finance
• Print ISSN: 0929-1199
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 77
• Article Number: 102315
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2022.102315
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1187695