>Readers of the Urban-Regional-Planning List might be interested in this
>book. For more information please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262182289
>
>The Color of Credit
>Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement
>Stephen L. Ross and John Yinger
>
>In 2000, homeownership in the United States stood at an all-time high of
>67.4 percent, but the homeownership rate was more than 50 percent higher
>for non-Hispanic whites than for blacks or Hispanics. Homeownership is the
>most common method for wealth accumulation and is viewed as critical for
>access to the most desirable communities and most comprehensive public
>services. Homeownership and mortgage lending are linked, of course, as the
>vast majority of home purchases are made with the help of a mortgage loan.
>Barriers to obtaining a mortgage represent obstacles to attaining the
>American dream of owning one's own home. These barriers take on added
>urgency when they are related to race or ethnicity.
>
>In this book Stephen Ross and John Yinger discuss what has been learned
>about mortgage-lending discrimination in recent years. They re-analyze
>existing loan-approval and loan-performance data and devise new tests for
>detecting discrimination in contemporary mortgage markets. They provide an
>in-depth review of the 1996 Boston Fed Study and its critics, along with
>new evidence that the minority-white loan-approval disparities in the
>Boston data represent discrimination, not variation in underwriting
>standards that can be justified on business grounds. Their analysis also
>reveals several major weaknesses in the current fair-lending enforcement
>system, namely, that it entirely overlooks one of the two main types of
>discrimination (disparate impact), misses many cases of the other main
>type (disparate treatment), and insulates some discriminating lenders from
>investigation. Ross and Yinger devise new procedures to overcome these
>weaknesses and show how the procedures can also be applied to
>discrimination in loan-pricing and credit-scoring.
>
>Stephen L. Ross is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of
>Connecticut. John Yinger is Trustee Professor of Public Administration and
>Economics at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
>
>6 x 9, 432 pp., 16 illus., cloth, ISBN 0-262-18228-9
>
>"Ross and Yinger use their clever conceptual and empirical analyses to cut
>through the rhetorical fog obscuring the issue of mortgage market
>discrimination. Their pathbreaking test for discrimination provides the
>foundation for the next generation of research and enforcement initiatives."
>--George Galster, Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs, Wayne State University
>______________________
>David Weininger
>Associate Publicist
>The MIT Press
>5 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor
>Cambridge, MA 02142
>617 253 2079
>617 253 1709 fax
>http://mitpress.mit.edu
___________________________________________________
Richard Kingston
Centre for Computational Geography,
School of Geography, University of Leeds,
England. LS2 9JT
Tel: 0113-34-33309 Fax: 0113-34-33308
http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/
___________________________________________________
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