This study tests for the presence of prejudicial or "noneconomic" discrimination on the part of mortgage lenders by evaluating the performance of home mortgage loans. The approach differs from that of previous studies of loan performance in that it is based on the proposition that noneconomic...

Some have suggested that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and affordable housing goals of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), caused the subprime crisis. We examine if these programs led to worse mortgage outcomes using two approaches. The first examines...

We show that bank branching tends to mitigate localized market power by broadening the geographic scope of competition among banks, even though branch banking allows banks to differentiate themselves through their choices of branch locations. Banking services at peripheral locations will be...