IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedhfi/95-8.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The cultural affinity hypothesis and mortgage lending decisions

Author

Listed:
  • William C. Hunter
  • Mary Beth Walker

Abstract

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the cultural affinity hypothesis put forth by Calomiris, et al. (1994) in the mortgage lending market. This hypothesis implies that white loan officers, because of a lack of familiarity with minority applicants, will rely more heavily on characteristics that can be observed at low cost (e.g., objective loan application measures) in evaluating the creditworthiness of minority applicants relative to white applicants. Using a cleansed sample of 1,991 loan applications drawn from data collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the results of the analysis were consistent with the cultural affinity hypothesis. In particular, we found that marginal black and Hispanic applicants appeared to be held to higher quantitative standards on such objective factors as credit history and debt obligation ratios than were similarly situated marginal white applicants. Copyright 1996 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • William C. Hunter & Mary Beth Walker, 1995. "The cultural affinity hypothesis and mortgage lending decisions," Working Paper Series, Issues in Financial Regulation 95-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhfi:95-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Mortgages; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedhfi:95-8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lauren Wiese (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbchus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.