Date: Wednesday May 8 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time

Speaker: Yongqiang Chu (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

Paper Title: Partisan Loan Officers and the Racial Gap in Mortgage Lending

Abstract: I construct a novel sample by combining the mortgage data CoreLogic, HMDA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac and the North Carolina voter registration data. I find that Democratic loan officers originate more loans to minority borrowers than Republican loan officers. The results hold after controlling for demand-side factors. At the loan level, I find that Democratic loan officers are more likely to originate loans with higher debt-to-income ratios to minority borrowers than republican loan officers. Examining loan delinquency, I find that loans to minority borrowers originated by Democratic loan officers perform slightly better than those originated by Republican loan officers. These results suggest that Democratic loan officers collect and process more private information to help minority borrowers overcome deficiencies in hard information, and hence expand mortgage access for minority borrowers.

Registration Link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CxNQFxKSRa6VqGfIxnV7hw