OxTalks is Changing
OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Measuring Bias in Consumer Lending
This paper tests for bias in consumer lending decisions using administrative data from a high-cost lender in the United Kingdom. We motivate our analysis using a simple model of bias in lending, which predicts that profits should be identical for loan applicants from different groups at the margin if loan examiners are unbiased. We identify the profitability of marginal loan applicants by exploiting variation from the quasi-random assignment of loan examiners. We find significant bias against both immigrant and older loan applicants when using the firm’s preferred measure of long-run profits. In contrast, there is no evidence of bias when using a short-run measure used to evaluate examiner performance, suggesting that the bias in our setting is due to the misalignment of firm and examiner incentives. We conclude by showing that a decision rule based on machine learning predictions of long-run profitability can simultaneously increase profits and eliminate bias.
Please sign up for meetings using the schedule below:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RGiVMwMBw0NPXh9BF6ooO6HJA1J56wqf_en2deCi-ZY/edit#gid=0
Date:
11 October 2018, 16:30
Venue:
Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details:
Seminar Room A
Speaker:
Will Dobbie (Princeton University)
Organising department:
Department of Economics
Part of:
Applied Microeconomics Seminar
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Melis Clark
