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Working Paper
Your Friends, Your Credit: Social Capital Measures Derived from Social Media and the Credit Market
Chetty et al. (2022a) introduced an array of social capital measures derived from Facebook friendships and found that one of these indicators, economic connectedness (EC), predicted upward income mobility well. Bricker and Li (2017) proposed the average credit score of a community's residents as an indicator of local social trust. We show in this paper that the average credit scores are robustly correlated with EC, negatively correlated with the friending-bias measure introduced in Chetty et al. (2022b), and predict economic mobility to a comparable extent after controlling for EC. The ...
Working Paper
How Much Does Racial Bias Affect Mortgage Lending? Evidence from Human and Algorithmic Credit Decisions
We assess racial discrimination in mortgage approvals using confidential data on mortgage applications. Minority applicants tend to have significantly lower credit scores, higher leverage, and are less likely than White applicants to receive algorithmic approval from raceblind government-automated underwriting systems (AUS). Observable applicant-risk factors explain most of the racial disparities in lender denials. Further, we exploit the AUS data to show there are risk factors we do not directly observe, and our analysis indicates that these factors explain at least some of the residual 1-2 ...