Cross-lender variation in home mortgage lending

An evaluation of the feasibility of using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data to form quantitative measures of fair lending for use in enforcement. The authors find that cross-lender differences in minority and low-income originations primarily reflect differences in application rates, not in approval rates, and that most of the variation in lender behavior cannot be attributed to variance in applicant characteristics reported in the HMDA data or to differences in the geographic markets served by the lenders.