Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 22.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Does distance matter in banking?
Deregulation and technological change have reduced the transactions costs that led to the dominance of local financial service suppliers, leading some to question if distance still matters in banking. This debate has been particularly acute in small business banking, where transactions costs are believed to be particularly high. This paper provides a detailed review of the literature on distance in banking markets, highlighting the reasons why geographic proximity is believed to be important and examining the changes that may have affected its importance. Relying on new data from the 2003 ...
Journal Article
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.
Working Paper
Reexamining the 'Role of the Community Reinvestment Act in Mortgage Supply and the U.S. Housing Boom'
Concerns have lingered since the 2007 subprime crisis that government housing policies promote risky mortgage lending. The first peer-reviewed evidence of a causal effect was published by the Review of Financial Studies in a paper (Saadi, 2020) linking the crisis to changes in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1995. A review of that paper, however, shows that it misrepresents the policy changes as having taken effect in mid-1998, 2.5 years after they were implemented. When the correct timing is used, a similar analysis yields no evidence of a relationship between CRA and riskier ...
Working Paper
Reexamining the 'Role of the Community Reinvestment Act in Mortgage Supply and the U.S. Housing Boom'
Concerns have lingered since the 2007 subprime crisis that government housing policies promote risky mortgage lending. The first peer-reviewed evidence of a causal effect was published by the Review of Financial Studies in a paper (Saadi, 2020) linking the crisis to changes in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1995. A review of that paper, however, shows that it misrepresents the policy changes as having taken effect in mid-1998, 2.5 years after they were implemented. When the correct timing is used, a similar analysis yields no evidence of a relationship between CRA and riskier ...
Journal Article
The mortgage market in 2011: highlights from the data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act
This article presents a number of key findings from a review of the data that mortgage lending institutions reported for 2011 under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The article documents home-lending activity reflected in the HMDA data and places the 2011 activity in historical context. It also examines changes in mortgage market concentration in recent years and in the credit scores of recent homebuyers. In addition, the article reviews patterns of lending across different racial or ethnic and income groups and across areas that differ in terms of housing market distress. Finally, it ...
Working Paper
Does Giving CRA Credit for Loan Purchases Increase Mortgage Credit in Low-to-Moderate Income Communities?
Under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) banks can fulfill their affirmative obligation to meet local credit needs by lending in low-to-moderate-income (LMI) communities or by purchasing loans made by others. This paper evaluates whether giving CRA credit for purchases has had its intended effect of increasing LMI credit availability by making LMI loans more liquid. Analyses using a regression discontinuity design show that CRA increases loan purchases without affecting LMI originations. Instead, banks purchase loans that are temporarily diverted from the Government Sponsored Enterprises, ...
Working Paper
The subprime crisis: Is government housing policy to blame?
A growing literature suggests that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the affordable housing goals of the government sponsored enterprises, may have caused the subprime crisis. The conclusions drawn in this literature, for the most part, have been based on associations between aggregated national trends. In this paper we examine more directly whether these programs were associated with worse outcomes in the mortgage market, including delinquency rates and measures of loan quality. We rely on two empirical approaches. In the first approach, which focuses on ...
Working Paper
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 ...
Journal Article
The mortgage market in 2011: highlights from the data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act
This article presents a number of key findings from a review of the data that mortgage lending institutions reported for 2011 under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The article documents home-lending activity reflected in the HMDA data and places the 2011 activity in historical context. It also examines changes in mortgage market concentration in recent years and in the credit scores of recent homebuyers. In addition, the article reviews patterns of lending across different racial or ethnic and income groups and across areas that differ in terms of housing market distress. Finally, it ...
Working Paper
Credit where none is due? Authorized user account status and \"piggybacking credit\"
An "authorized user" is a person who is permitted by a revolving account holder to use an account without being legally liable for any charges incurred. The Federal Reserve's Regulation B, which implements the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, requires that information on spousal authorized user accounts be reported to the credit bureaus and considered when lenders evaluate credit history. Since creditors generally furnish to the credit bureaus information on all authorized user accounts, without indicating which are spouses and which are not, credit scoring modelers cannot distinguish ...