Abstract: Utilizing a nearest-neighbor research design, I find that households exposed to green neighbors within 0.1 miles are 1.6 times more likely to make their homes green within a year than unexposed households. The exposure also increases the likelihood of multi-property owners certifying their faraway secondary properties green, emphasizing that information from neighbors, not neighborhood characteristics alone, drives the effect. While financial benefits including green home prices, electricity savings, and regulatory incentives strengthen peer effects, pro-environmental preferences do not. An information-cost-based discrete choice model explains the findings and suggests that incorporating peer effect metrics in subsidies may accelerate green home investments.

Abstract: Tighter regulations on consumer debt collectors, although intended to curb predatory practices, may disrupt industries to which such debts are owed. Using a paired-county stacked difference-in-differences design, we show that these regulations adversely affect hospitals. While hospital patient volume remains unchanged, their account receivables, liabilities, and profitability deteriorate, with stronger effects for ex-ante higher financial liability and debt collector density. Hospitals respond by reducing capacity, employment, and care quality, and by steering patients to high-cost procedures. Additionally, non-profit hospitals reduce charity care for uninsured patients. Overall, ignoring spillovers of consumer financial protection laws on non-financial sectors may overstate their benefits.

Abstract: Many public and private universities in the U.S. rely on bank loans to finance operations. We document that shocks to banks' credit supply have a significant impact on the borrowing universities and their students. Exploiting the staggered implementation of bank stress tests as a plausibly exogenous shock to credit supply and loan costs, we show that constrained access to bank credit leads universities to raise tuition while cutting expenditures on teaching and research. This effect, however, varies by institutional type. Teaching-oriented (or public) universities significantly increase tuition and sharply reduce research spending, whereas research-oriented (or private) institutions preserve tuition levels but disproportionately cut teaching expenditures. Students enrolled in universities exposed to bank stress tests borrow more student debt to afford education. They face a higher likelihood of defaulting and experience slower earnings growth after graduation. Overall, our findings demonstrate that bank credit shocks propagate into higher education, shaping both institutional priorities and student outcomes.