J ournalists, businessmen, politicians, and regulators are paying increasing attention to the subject of discrimination in lending, with particular emphasis on mortgage lending. It sometimes seems as though the main issues in antidiscrimination efforts have shifted from education and labor markets to the credit markets. Two different federal laws deal with discrimination in lending: the Fair Ho...

USD Trans-Border Institute • 1 • www.sandiego.edu/tbi ...microcredit advocates believe that access to credit enables people to improve their own lives and economic situation. ...this brief examines the use of microcredit lending in the U.S.-Mexico border region, a complex, highly metropolitan area. Microcredit Lending in the Border Region Microcredit lending has become a major innovation in ant...

Does related lending, the practice of bankers extending credit to their own enterprises, help financial development by allowing bankers to assess risk ex ante and monitor borrowers ex post, or does it hinder financial development by creating a mechanism for bankers to loot their own banks? Drawing on both cross-country regressions and case studies we argue that whether related lending is positi...

Microfinance institutions focus on providing financial services for low-income citizens who typically lack access to traditional banking systems. In recent years there has been an significant growth in the number of online microlending sites that connect lenders to microfinance institutions and individuals that require funding. Although traditional (offline) microfinance has been widely studied...

Working papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views stated herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank...

This paper uses comprehensive data on bank lending and establishment-level outcomes from 1997-2011 to test whether changes in small business bank lending affect the real economy. The shift-share style research design predicts county-level lending shocks using variation in pre-existing bank market shares and estimated bank supply-shifts. Counties with negative predicted supply shocks experienced...

In order to stimulate or subdue the economy, banking regulators have sought to impose caps or floors on individual bank’s lending to certain types of borrowers. This paper shows that the resultant decision problem for a bank of which potential borrower to accept is a variant of the marriage/secretary problem where one can accept several applicants. The paper solves the decision problem using dy...

Despite widespread belief that redlining contributed to disinvestment in cities, there has been little empirical analysis of historical lending patterns. The lack of appropriate data and clear definitions of redlining has contributed to this void. This article reviews definitions and methods that have emerged from research on lending in recent years and considers how they can be applied to rese...