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Working Paper
Redlining in Boston: do mortgage lenders discriminate against neighborhoods?
Historically, lenders have been accused of "redlining" minority neighborhoods as well as refusing to lend to minority applicants. Considerable bank regulation is designed to prevent both actions. However, the strong correlation between race and neighborhood makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of geographic discrimination from the effects of racial discrimination. Previous studies have failed to untangle these two influences, in part, because of severe omitted variable bias. The data set in this paper allows the distinct effects of race and geography to be identified, and it shows ...
Journal Article
A decade of boom and bust in the prices of single-family homes: Boston and Los Angeles, 1983 to 1993
The 1980s and 1990s have been turbulent times in the U.S. market for single-family homes. For most of the previous two decades, housing prices across states and metropolitan areas moved together and increased slowly in real terms while regional differences generally remained small. The 1980s and 1990s, in contrast, have seen increased price volatility and sharp differences in price behavior across regions with substantial housing price booms in some regions and major price declines in others. ; These boom-bust cycles had serious consequences for regional economies and national mortgage ...
Journal Article
Mortgage lending in Boston: a response to the critics
Three years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released an examination of racial patterns in mortgage denial rates in the Boston area. The study was motivated by newly available data on mortgage applications, showing that black and Hispanic applicants were two to three times as likely to be turned down for mortgages as white applicants. The study gathered all the variables thought to be missing from the HMDA analysis, such as the applicants' debt burdens and credit histories, to see whether these economic factors explained the racial difference in denial rates. Although the additional ...
Journal Article
Roxbury merchants: doing business in inter-city Boston
Journal Article
Running in cycles: too much office space?
As the market for downtown office space recovers from yet another boom and bust, are there reasons to think that future cycles may be less volatile than in the past?