We explore the sources of racial disparities in small business lending by studying $806 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was designed to support jobs during COVID-19 pandemic. PPP loans were administered private lenders but federally guaranteed, largely eliminating unobservable credit risk as a factor explaining differential race. document that even after controlling for firm’s ...

We briefly review the evolution of empirical work on discrimination. We discuss why traditional regression-based approaches neither convincingly measure market discrimination nor disentangle the relative importance of animus versus statistical discrimination in explaining such discrimination as exists. We describe the development of modern correspondence studies. We argue that these studies hav...

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay more in underwriting fees to issue tax-exempt bonds, compared to similar, non-HBCU schools. This appears to reflect higher deadweight costs of findings willing buyers: the effect is three times larger in the Deep South, where racial animus has historically been the highest. School attributes or credit quality explain almost none of the ef...