Weaker Credit or Racial Discrimination:
The Data Are Unclear
Some readers of our June 5 blog post on mortgage denial rates opined that the discrepancy in mortgage denial rates between white and minority applicants with weaker credit indicates racial discrimination.
It is important to note, however, that we do not know whether the clear racial discrepancy among those with weaker credit is due to variations in treatment of applicants with the same credit profile (i.e., racial discrimination) or variations in the level of credit weakness among these groups (i.e., minority applicants have weaker credit profiles than white applicants). We were not able to fully test either hypothesis, since the credit profile distribution of the mortgage applicants is unknown.
The only information available to researchers is the credit profile distribution of mortgage borrowers, which by itself is not enough to test the above hypotheses.
Nevertheless, we thought it might be helpful to provide further information about the credit profile distribution of the mortgage borrowers:
We analyzed the credit profile distribution of originated GSE loans by matching Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and CoreLogic data. We considered borrowers to have a weak credit profile if their loan fit into any of these three categories:
1. A combined loan-to-value ratio (CLTV) above 90, or
2. A back-end debt-to-income ratio (DTI) above 45, or
3. A CLTV below 90 and DTI below 45 with a FICO credit score below 680.
Note that an individual borrower could have a relatively strong credit profile if one only considers a single factor and not all three factors: CLTV, DTI, and FICO score.
When we further subdivide the borrowers, an interesting pattern emerges within the group of borrowers with the weakest credit profile: African American and Hispanic borrowers with weaker credit -- the lowest 25th percentile -- tend to have lower FICO scores than their white and Asian counterparts with weaker credit. The difference within the 25th percentile between African American and white borrowers is 19 units.
If the pattern for applicants who were denied a loan is consistent with that found in the bottom quartile of borrowers, which would be intuitive, African American mortgage applicants may simply have weaker credit profiles than their white counterparts. This could account for the racial discrepancy in the denial rates of applicants with weak credit profiles.
Wei Li is a research associate in the Urban Institute's Housing Finance Policy Center. This piece originally appeared on the Urban Institute's MetroTrends blog.
