Discrimination in Mortgage Lending: What Have We Learned?

It has now been nearly four years since researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released their groundbreaking study on residential mortgage lending patterns in that city. Their findings showed that black and Hispanic applicants were over 50 percent more likely to be denied a mortgage loan than whites, even after taking into account many factors relevant to the credit-granting decision. In the end, they concluded that this disparity was the result of taste-based discrimination (bigotry) on the part of lenders active in the area.