An Investigation of Sex Discrimination in Commercial Banks' Direct Consumer Lending

Richard L. Peterson

Bell Journal of Economics, 1981, vol. 12, issue 2, 547-561

Abstract: This article develops a model of prejudicial discrimination in the credit markets. Data on 30,000 commercial bank consumer loans were used to test the model. No. systematic pattern of prejudicial sex discrimination was found -- even before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed. Instead, banks as a whole behaved as profit maximizers, and made loans on equivalent terms to equally risky customers, regardless of sex. These findings suggest that future regulatory initiatives, such as proposed extensions of ECOA, should be thoroughly scrutinized whenever they impose substantial costs under the assumption that firms are not profit maximizers.

Date: 1981
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0361-915X%2819812 ... O%3B2-M&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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:rje:bellje:v:12:y:1981:i:autumn:p:547-561

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://editorialexp ... i-bin/rje_online.cgi

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Bell Journal of Economics from The RAND Corporation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().