Racial Disparities in Credit Constraints in the Great Recession: Evidence from the UK

This paper investigates racial disparities in household credit constraints using U.K. survey data. We find a widening disparity in the proportion of racial minority households reporting they face credit constraints compared with non-minority households over the period 2006-2009. By 2009 three times as many racial minority households faced credit constraints compared with White households. The difference in credit constraints across racial minority and non-minority households is not explained by a broad set of covariates. While crosssection variation in reported credit constraints might most likely reflect unobservables, we argue this time series variation is very unlikely to arise due to unobservables and is evidence of growing perceived disparity in credit access between racial groups over the period.