Minority Mortgage Market Experiences and the Financial Crisis

Stephen Ross at Vox EU:

Minority mortgage market experiences leading up to and during the Financial Crisis, by Stephen L. Ross, Vox EU: The subprime lending crisis in the US triggered a broad financial panic that lead to the global recession. Domestically, it meant bankruptcy and disaster for many households. This column analyses racial discrimination in subprime lending. Careful estimation of a detailed dataset reveals across-lender effects to have substantially disadvantaged black and Hispanic borrowers.

The concluding paragraph:

... Minority homebuyers – especially blacks – tend to face a higher cost of mortgage credit and had substantially worse credit market outcomes during the recent downturn than white homebuyers with equivalent mortgage risk factors. In terms of the price of credit, a majority of the unexplained differences are associated with the lender from which the homebuyer obtained credit. These effects are felt most among minority borrowers with the lowest levels of education, and are likely due in part to the concentrated activity of subprime lenders in minority neighborhoods and a lack of knowledge of financial markets among minority borrowers with low levels of education. On the other hand, most of the racial differences in loan performance that are unexplained by traditional credit risk factors cannot be captured by controlling for the lender or other aspects of subprime lending. African-Americans and Hispanics appear to be more vulnerable to an economic downturn and to the associated risks of unemployment and housing price declines than observationally similar white homeowners. This higher vulnerability is most pronounced for borrowers who purchased their homes right before the onset of the financial crisis, even after controlling for the increased risk of negative equity associated with buying at the peak of the market. While the expansion of the subprime sector may have contributed to a higher cost of credit for black homebuyers, their concentration in high cost loans (and in the subprime market more generally) can explain only a small portion of the racial differences in foreclosure. Rather, a broad spectrum of black and Hispanic borrowers appear to be especially vulnerable to the economic downturn and associated shocks to their ability to meet their mortgage commitments.