Should Fair-lending Investigators Better Mix Qualitative and Quantitative Methods?

Christopher E Cosans

Journal of Financial Regulation, 2019, vol. 5, issue 1, 91-100

Abstract: The author examines a controversy over the methods used by federal agencies to enforce fair-lending laws. Some hold that investigators should use primarily qualitative reviews of documents in loan files in their investigations. Others hold that the qualitative methodology of file reviews is inadequate and needs to be supplemented or replaced by quantitative statistical methods. The author argues that the methods in the federal Interagency Fair Lending Examination Procedure should be revised to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in a better way so that they complement each other. Investigations should rely primarily on quantitative methods to investigate institutional discrimination, but use the qualitative methods of file reviews in the investigation of individual agents for their discriminatory decisions.

Keywords: discrimination; fair-lending investigation; file reviews; qualitative methods; quantitative methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jfr/fjy008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:refreg:v:5:y:2019:i:1:p:91-100.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Financial Regulation is currently edited by Dan Awrey, Geneviève Helleringer and Wolf-Georg Ringe

More articles in Journal of Financial Regulation from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().