Discrimination, Competition, and Loan Performance in FHA Mortgage Lending
通过分析FHA保险贷款数据，检验贷款机构是否存在非经济歧视，发现少数族裔借款人在竞争较弱的市场中贷款表现并不优于白人，未发现非经济歧视的证据。
This study tests for the presence of prejudicial or "noneconomic" discrimination on the part of mortgage lenders by evaluating the performance of home mortgage loans. The approach differs from that of previous studies of loan performance in that it is based on the proposition that noneconomic discrimination should be more pronounced in less competitive lending environments, while statistical discrimination should not. Using a rich set of FHA-insured loan records and measures of local market concentration to proxy the competitive environment, we test for the prediction of better loan performance by minority borrowers relative to white borrowers in more concentrated markets. We argue that this approach substantially reduces the potential for omitted-variable bias that has cast a shadow on previous studies of lending discrimination. Results fail to reject the null hypothesis of no noneconomic discrimination. © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology