Patterns in Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Lending

Glenn Loury

Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: This paper examines two issues of relevance to the general phenomenon of residential segregation in large U.S. cities. The first issue studied is the availability of mortgage credit to prospective home buyers. A national sample of mortgage loan applications and their disposition is studied in order to determine what impact, if any, race has on the availability of mortgage credit. The probability of loan approval is estimated using Berkson-Theil techniques and is found in the aggregate not to differ significantly for white and non-white applicants when relevant financial characteristics are controlled. However, a disaggregative analysis of the data reveals some interesting racial disparities. High income non-white buying expensive homes are found to have a significantly lower probability of being granted a mortgage than their similarly situated white counterparts. Moreover, considerable variation in the racial aspect of lending practices is found both among geographic regions among lending institutions within a given region. Some policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Pages: 30
Date: 1978
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:qed:wpaper:301

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Babcock ().