IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-030-65117-6_28.html

Technological Innovation and Discrimination in Household Finance

In: The Palgrave Handbook of Technological Finance

Author

Listed:
  • Adair Morse

    (Haas School of Business, University of California
    U.S. Department of the Treasury)

  • Karen Pence

    (Federal Reserve Board)

Abstract

Technology has changed how discrimination manifests itself in financial services. Replacing human discretion with algorithms in decision-making roles reduces taste-based discrimination, and new modeling techniques have expanded access to financial services to households who were previously excluded from these markets. However, algorithms can exhibit bias from human involvement in the development process, and their opacity and complexity can facilitate statistical discrimination inconsistent with antidiscrimination laws in several aspects of financial services provision, including advertising, pricing, and credit-risk assessment. In this chapter, we provide a new amalgamation and analysis of these developments, identifying five gateways whereby technology induces discrimination to creep into financial services. We also consider how these technological changes in finance intersect with existing discrimination and data privacy laws, leading to our contribution of four frontlines of regulation. Our analysis concludes that the net effect of innovation in technological finance on discrimination is ambiguous and depends on the future choices made by policymakers, the courts, and firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Adair Morse & Karen Pence, 2021. "Technological Innovation and Discrimination in Household Finance," Springer Books, in: Raghavendra Rau & Robert Wardrop & Luigi Zingales (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Technological Finance, pages 783-808, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-65117-6_28
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-65117-6_28
    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
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christophe Hurlin & Christophe Pérignon & Sébastien Saurin, 2026. "The Fairness of Credit Scoring Models," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 72(1), pages 406-425, January.
    2. Nathan Blascak & Anna Tranfaglia, 2021. "Decomposing Gender Differences in Bankcard Credit Limits: Evidence from Sole Mortgage Applicants," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2021-072r1, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 23 Feb 2026.
    3. Gambacorta, Leonardo & Cornelli, Giulio & Frost, Jon & Rau, Raghavendra & Wardrop, Robert & Ziegler, Tania, 2020. "Fintech and big tech credit: a new database," CEPR Discussion Papers 15357, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Seth Garz & Xavier Gine & Dean Karlan & Rafe Mazer & Caitlin Sanford & Jonathan Zinman, 2021. "Consumer Protection for Financial Inclusion in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Bridging Regulator and Academic Perspectives," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 13(1), pages 219-246, November.
    5. Nathan Blascak & Anna Tranfaglia, 2021. "Decomposing Gender Differences in Bankcard Credit Limits," Working Papers 21-35, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    6. Cornelli, Giulio & Frost, Jon & Gambacorta, Leonardo & Rau, P. Raghavendra & Wardrop, Robert & Ziegler, Tania, 2023. "Fintech and big tech credit: Drivers of the growth of digital lending," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    7. Tobias Berg & Andreas Fuster & Manju Puri, 2022. "FinTech Lending," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 14(1), pages 187-207, November.
    8. Allen, Franklin & Gu, Xian & Jagtiani, Julapa, 2022. "Fintech, Cryptocurrencies, and CBDC: Financial Structural Transformation in China," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    9. Vives, Xavier & Ye, Zhiqiang, 2025. "Fintech entry, lending market competition, and welfare," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    10. Eglė Jakučionytė & Swapnil Singh, 2023. "Emergence of subprime lending in minority neighborhoods," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 51(6), pages 1547-1583, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance
    • K2 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law
    • K38 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Human Rights Law; Gender Law; Animal Rights Law
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    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:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-65117-6_28. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.