Attention Constraints and Financial Inclusion
研究发现，贷款审批人员的注意力有限，导致他们更易拒绝低社会经济地位的申请人，而工作负荷加重时，这种偏见会进一步扩大审批率差距。
Abstract We show that attention constraints on decision-makers create barriers to financial inclusion. Using administrative data on retail loan-screening processes, we find that attention-constrained loan officers exert less effort reviewing applicants of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and reject them more frequently. More importantly, when externally imposed increases in loan officers’ workloads tighten attention constraints, loan officers are even more prone to quickly reject low-SES applicants but quickly accept very high-SES applicants without careful review. Such selective attention allocation further widens the approval rate gap between high- and low-SES applicants—a unique prediction of this attention-based mechanism.