The 2006 HMDA data

Analyzes the 2006 data collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The review focuses primarily on the pricing information in the data. Includes an assessment of factors that account for the variation in rates of serious delinquency on mortgage loans across U.S. metropolitan area counties observed as of March 31, 2007, with information drawn from the HMDA data on the incidence of higher-priced lending and from credit scores by geographic area.Mortgage loans ; Bank loans

The 2007 HMDA data

Mortgage loans ; Bank loans

The 2009 HMDA data: the mortgage market in a time of low interest rates and economic distress

Mortgages ; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

The 2008 HMDA data: the mortgage market during a turbulent year

The data that mortgage lending institutions reported for 2008 under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA) reflect the ongoing difficulties in the housing and mortgage markets. This article presents a number of key findings from a review of the 2008 HMDA data. In particular, it documents a reduction in lending activity that was experienced by all groups of borrowers, highlights the Federal Housing Administration's greatly expanded role in the mortgage market, and examines how atypical changes in the interest rate environment affected the incidence of reported higher-priced lending in 2008 relative to earlier years.Mortgages ; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

The Surprising Use of Credit Scoring in Small Business Lending by Community Banks and the Attendant Effects on Credit Availability and Risk

The literature has documented a positive relationship between the use of credit scoring for small business loans and small business credit availability, broadly defined. However, this literature is hampered by the fact that all of the studies are based on a single 1998 survey of the very largest U.S. banking organizations. This paper addresses a number of deficiencies in the extant literature by employing data from a new survey on the use of credit scoring in small business lending, primarily by community banks. The survey evidence suggests that the use of credit scores in small business lending by community banks is surprisingly widespread. Moreover, the scores employed tend to be the consumer credit scores of the small business owners rather than the more encompassing small business credit scores that include data on the firms as well as on the owners. Our empirical analysis suggests that credit scoring is associated with increased small business lending after a learning period, with no material change in the quality of the loan portfolio. However, these quantity and quality results appear to vary depending on the way in which credit scores are implemented in the underwriting process

Banking across Borders with Heterogeneous Banks

Individual banks differ substantially in their foreign operations. This paper introduces heterogeneous banks into a general equilibrium framework of banking across borders to explain the documented variation. While the model matches existing micro and macro evidence, novel and unexplored predictions of the theory are also strongly supported by the data: The efficiency of the least efficient bank active in a host country increases the greater the impediments to banking across borders and the efficiency of the banking sector in the host country. There is also evidence of a tradeoff between proximity and fixed costs in banking. Banks hold more assets and liabilities in foreign affiliates relative to cross-border positions if the target country is further away and the cost of foreign direct investment is low. These results suggest that fixed costs play a crucial role in the foreign activities of banks

Neighborhood Racial Characteristics, Credit History, and Bankcard Credit in Indian Country

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 find that residing in a predominantly American Indian neighborhood is ceteris paribus associated with worse bankcard credit outcomes than residing in a neighborhood where the share of American Indian residents is low. While these results are consistent with the possibility of lenders’ discrimination based on community racial characteristics, we explain why our findings should not be readily interpreted as conclusive evidence thereof. We further find that consumer’s credit history is a robust and quantitatively more important predictor of bankcard credit outcomes than racial composition of the consumer’s neighborhood, and that the consumer’s location vis-à-vis a reservation exhibits no effect on bankcard credit outcomes

Credit card redlining revisited

Using a proprietary dataset of credit bureau records, Cohen-Cole (2008) finds that banks set credit limits on revolving accounts based in part on the racial composition of the neighborhood in which each borrower resides. This paper evaluates the evidence presented in that working paper using the same proprietary database of credit bureau records. The replication effort presented in this paper suggests that decisions about how to calculate the variables used in that study may have resulted in the unnecessary exclusion of one-fifth of available observations from the estimation samples and may have increased the size of the reported effect by over 25 percent. Furthermore, this analysis suggests that when a control for neighborhood income is added to the estimations, the results presented as evidence of redlining activities disappear.Discrimination in consumer credit ; Discrimination in credit cards