Bad taste : gender discrimination in the consumer credit market

We randomly assigned consumer loan requests (of random amount and length) to gender-balanced prospective-borrowers who then randomly submitted them to a representative sample of loan-officers from Chilean banks. We find that loan requests submitted by women are 18.3% less likely to be approved, with most of the gender effect coming from gender-biased officers, particularly males. We further randomly informed some officers about official statistics indicating that women have higher repayment rates than men and find that gender-biased officers in the treatment-group discriminated more against women relative to their control counterparts, suggesting overconfidence bias as a potential mechanism behind taste-based discrimination.