Same-Sex Marriage Laws and Demand for Mortgage Credit

To our knowledge, this paper is the first to describe the pathways through which same-sex marriage laws are thought to increase same-sex mortgage applications. The paper is also the first to use the HMDA dataset to examine the pattern of same-sex mortgage applications over time and exploit state variation to estimate the causal effect of changes in same-sex marriage laws on same-sex mortgage applications. The findings further our understanding of the economics of the same-sex household at a crucial point in time in the evolution of legal equality and social acceptance.