Brittany Lewis

Brittany Lewis

Assistant Professor, Olin Business School, Finance

My work studies the differential effect of macro prudential bank regulation by race. Specifically, racial differences in access to housing, the financial products used to obtain housing, debt servicing of those products, and ultimately borrower distress. One example, titled “The Impact of Collateral Value on Mortgage Originations,” was supported by Indiana University’s Racial Justice Research Fund. In this paper, I find that zip codes more exposed to a credit supply increase in wholesale lending markets, increased lending to high-income-variability borrowers via alternative products. The paper documents that this policy change caused a disproportionate expansion of negative amortizing mortgages among Black and Latino zip codes relative to white zip codes. I find that both early payment defaults and overall defaults increased in Black and Latino zip codes relative to white zip codes in response to the use of these products. In a separate paper, I find that in response to stricter bank regulation, banks disproportionately sell mortgage servicing rights for majority Black and Latino zip codes to shadow banks, who provide less liquidity to borrowers.


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