We examine whether concerns about lenders’ discrimination based on community racial characteristics can be empirically substantiated in the context of neighborhoods on and near American Indian reservations. Drawing on a large-scale dataset consisting of individual-level credit bureau records,...

We investigate the relationship between immigrant status and mortgage delinquency in the United States. We find that after controlling for observables, newly arrived immigrants are likely to have a higher delinquency rate on mortgages than natives, while immigrants who have resided in the United...

This paper develops a travel-based metric to measure Canadians' access to cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches. Our findings indicate that the average distance Canadians need to travel to reach the nearest ABM is 2.0 km, while the average distance to the...

We show that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), from its inception in the 1930s, did not insure mortgages in low income urban neighborhoods where the vast majority of urban Black Americans lived. The agency evaluated neighborhoods using block-level information collected by New Deal relief...

We explore the sources of racial disparities in small business lending by studying the $806 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was designed to support small business jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. PPP loans were administered by private lenders but federally guaranteed, largely...

An oft-touted benefit of homeownership is the ability to build and access equity, and in recent years the amount of "tappable" home equity held by US homeowners has reached historic levels. But more than one-quarter of recent applications for mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW) loan products were...

Does pro-immigrant legislation improve financial inclusion? This paper examines how granting safe havens for immigrants impacts Hispanics' financial behavior and discrimination against them in the U.S. mortgage market. To identify the effect, I take advantage of the staggered implementation of...

We study the impact of the 1930s HOLC residential security maps on experienced segregation based on cell phone records which track visits out of and into home neighborhoods. We compare adjacent neighborhoods, one of which was assigned a lower grade for creditworthiness than the other. We use a...

Low-income and Black households are less likely to visit bank branches than high-income and White households, despite the former two groups appearing to rely more on branches as means of bank participation. We assess whether unequal branch access can explain that disparity. We propose a measure...

We find that banks differ in their propensity to lend to minorities based on their stakeholders' aversion to inequality. Using mortgage application data collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, we document a large and persistent cross-sectional variation in banks' propensity to lend to...