The putative existence of race-based discrimination in mortgage pricing is both a scholarly and societal concern. Efforts to assess discrimination empirically, however, are typically plagued by omitted variables, which leave any evidence of discrimination open to interpretation. We take a two-pronged approach to the problem. First, we analyze a dataset comprising discretionary mortgage fees collected by brokers working for a brokerage company. Mortgage brokers are intermediaries between lenders and borrowers; they neither approve loans nor share in the risk of default. Variables that measure risk should therefore have no effect on these discretionary fees, and indeed, we show that default risk as measured by credit scores have no effect on discretionary pricing. Second, we perform a formal sensitivity analysis that quantifies the impact of potentially omitted variables. Our results suggest that minority borrowers pay more on average for mortgages than non-minorities, and that this effect persists even in the presence of unmeasured confounders.

中文翻译：

---

抵押定价和种族：来自东北的证据

抵押定价中基于种族的歧视的既定存在既是学术上的也是社会上的关注。但是，通常凭经验评估歧视的努力通常会被遗漏的变量所困扰，这些变量会导致任何歧视的证据都易于解释。对于这个问题，我们采取两种方法。首先，我们分析一个数据集，该数据集包含为经纪公司工作的经纪人收取的全权抵押贷款费用。抵押经纪人是贷方和借款人之间的中介；他们既不批准贷款也不承担违约风险。因此，衡量风险的变量应该不会影响这些全权委托费用，实际上，我们表明，以信用评分衡量的违约风险对全权委托定价没有影响。第二，我们执行正式的敏感性分析，以量化可能遗漏的变量的影响。我们的结果表明，少数族裔借款人平均支付的抵押贷款要比非少数族裔借款更多，即使在存在无法衡量的混杂因素的情况下，这种影响仍然存在。