Search Results
Working Paper
Commercial lending and distance: evidence from Community Reinvestment Act data
Innovations such as credit scoring have increased the ability of banks to lend to distant business borrowers, which could expand the geographic market for small business loans. However, if this effect is limited to a few large banks, the market may become segmented and lending distance at local banks actually decreases. This paper, using a new data source and a spatial econometric model, empirically estimates the relationship between distance and commercial lending and how this relationship is evolving over time. We find distance is negatively associated with the likelihood of a local ...
Journal Article
The 2009 HMDA data: the mortgage market in a time of low interest rates and economic distress
The data that mortgage lending institutions reported for 2009 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 2009 HMDA data. In particular, it documents the wave of refinancing but discusses factors that may have muted such opportunities, explores patterns of lending across groups and areas with high rates of foreclosure, highlights the federal government’s greatly expanded role in the mortgage market, and examines how the interest rate ...
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 ...
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 ...
Journal Article
The mortgage market in 2010: 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 2010 under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The article documents home-purchase lending activity reflected in the HMDA data and discusses how the ending of the government's first-time homebuyer tax credit program during the year may have affected such lending. It also documents refinance lending activity and explores factors that may have muted such lending during 2010. In addition, the article closely examines patterns of lending across different racial or ethnic ...
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, ...
Journal Article
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 ...
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 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 ...
Working Paper
Who competes with whom? the case of depository institutions
Little empirical work exists on the substitutability of depository institutions. In particular, the willingness of consumers to substitute banks for thrifts and to switch between multimarket and single-market institutions (i.e., institutions with large vs. small branch networks) has been of strong interest to policymakers. We estimate a structural model of consumer choice of depository institutions using a panel data set that includes most depository institutions and market areas in the United States over the period 1990-2001. Using a flexible framework, we uncover utility parameters that ...