Credit Availability for Minority Business Owners in an Evolving Credit Environment: Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Brett Barkley and Mark Schweitzer

No 22-18, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: We apply data from the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey from 2016 to 2020 to estimate disparities in access to small business financing through loan denials and discouragement. We find that substantial credit disparities continue to exist despite the growth of fintech lenders, which prior research shows have expanded the set of small businesses receiving credit. Because the pandemic period brought many direct changes to the business and lending environment, we separately analyze the change to lending in 2020. PPP loans represented an unprecedented support for small businesses, support that was not dependent on the creditworthiness of businesses, but minority-owned businesses are estimated to have received a smaller fraction of the funds they applied for from the program.

Keywords: small business lending; minority credit access; fintech; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 L5 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2022-06-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cfn and nep-ent
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202218 Full Text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwq:94290

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-202218

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().