Bad taste: Gender discrimination in the consumer credit market

Arbeitspapier

We randomly assigned consumer loan requests (of random amount and length) to gender-balanced prospective-borrowers who then randomly submitted them to a representative sample of loan-officers from Chilean banks. We find that loan requests submitted by women are 18.3% less likely to be approved, with most of the gender effect coming from gender-biased officers, particularly males. We further randomly informed some officers about official statistics indicating that women have higher repayment rates than men and find that gender-biased officers in the treatment-group discriminated more against women relative to their control counterparts, suggesting overconfidence bias as a potential mechanism behind taste-based discrimination.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IDB Working Paper Series ; No. IDB-WP-1053

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination ; Labor Discrimination ; Financial Institutions and Services: General ; Behavioral Finance: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making in Financial Markets‡
• Subject: Gender discrimination ; Consumer loans ; Experimental evidence

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Montoya, Ana María ; Parrado, Eric ; Solis, Alex ; Undurraga, Raimundo
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
• (where): Washington, DC
• (when): 2020

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.18235/0001921
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/234661
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET