Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/123235 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5594
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
We examine whether concerns about lenders’ discrimination based on community racial characteristics can be empirically substantiated in the context of neighborhoods on and near American Indian reservations. Drawing on a large-scale dataset consisting of individual-level credit bureau records, we find that residing in a predominantly American Indian neighborhood is ceteris paribus associated with worse bankcard credit outcomes than residing in a neighborhood where the share of American Indian residents is low. While these results are consistent with the possibility of lenders’ discrimination based on community racial characteristics, we explain why our findings should not be readily interpreted as conclusive evidence thereof. We further find that consumer’s credit history is a robust and quantitatively more important predictor of bankcard credit outcomes than racial composition of the consumer’s neighborhood, and that the consumer’s location vis-à-vis a reservation exhibits no effect on bankcard credit outcomes.
Subjects: 
bankcard credit
American Indian reservations
discrimination
neighborhood racial characteristics
credit history
JEL: 
G21
J15
P43
R11
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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