Beschreibung:
Using the confidential Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data from 2018 to 2021, we estimate differences in denial rates for conventional 30-year mortgage applications for home purchases between racial and ethnic groups. Our baseline specification finds that Black applicants are 2.8 percentage points more likely to have their mortgage application denied relative to White applicants, while Asian and Latinx applicants are 2.1 percentage points and 1.4 percentage points, respectively, more likely to be denied. These disparities remain after controlling for newly available variables in the data including credit score. They are small in absolute magnitude but large relative to the low overall denial rate of 3.7 percent in our sample. When we estimate within lender disparities, we find wide variation across the largest lenders with around a third of lenders having disparities that exceed our overall baseline estimates. Our results suggest that racial disparities in mortgage access persist even within the standardized 30-year conventional loan product