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Discussion Paper
The Community Reinvestment Act and credit allocation
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 ...
Journal Article
Distribution of Credit Risk Among Providers of Mortgages to Lower-Income and Minority Homebuyers
Which institutions bear the credit risk for mortgage lending to lower-income and minority borrowers and in lower-income and predominantly minority neighborhoods? In seeking to answer those questions, the authors went beyond looking at mortgage credit risk in terms of numbers or amounts of loans and developed measures based on factors that affect the riskiness of loans, including loan-to-value ratios and associated default and loss severity rates. In 1995, a nonprofit government mortgage insurer, the Federal Housing Administration, was the major bearer of credit risk for mortgage lending to ...
Journal Article
Community banks and rural development: research relating to proposals to revise the regulations that implement the Community Reinvestment Act
Since 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has required that federally insured banking institutions be evaluated on their records of helping to meet the credit needs of their local communities. In 1995, the agencies responsible for bank supervision substantially revised the regulations that implement the CRA. The revisions were intended to emphasize performance rather than process, to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden, and to increase consistency in CRA evaluations. Since 1995, "large" institutions, generally those with assets of $250 million or more, have been evaluated under a ...
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.
Journal Article
Trends in home purchase lending: consolidation and the Community Reinvestment Act
Consolidation among banking institutions has substantially changed the structure of the banking industry. Between 1975 and 1997, the number of commercial banks and savings associations declined more than 40 percent. Over the same broad period, the market for home mortgage lending has also changed substantially. Notably, home mortgage lending is no longer primarily the province of banking institutions operating in the communities in which they have banking offices. In recent decades, mortgage and finance companies and banking organizations operating outside their local communities have gained ...
Working Paper
Does credit scoring produce a disparate impact?
The widespread use of credit scoring in the underwriting and pricing of mortgage and consumer credit has raised concerns that the use of these scores may unfairly disadvantage minority populations. A specific concern has been that the independent variables that comprise these models may have a disparate impact on these demographic groups. By "disparate impact" we mean that a variable's predictive power might arise not from its ability to predict future performance within any demographic group, but rather from acting as a surrogate for group membership. Using a unique source of data that ...