Three essays on financial economics: I. Minorities and racial disparities: Reasons for mortgage credit denial. II. Temporal causality and the dynamics of crime and delinquency. III. Does curbing corruption complement financial development in reducing income equality?

摘要

This dissertation includes three essays on financial economics. The first chapter, Minorities and Racial Disparities: Reasons for Mortgage Credit Denial, uses a multinomial logit model that explores different reasons for mortgage rejections to examine whether the race of an applicant is still an important factor in mortgage underwriting after controlling for borrower, loan, and neighborhood characteristics and to determine what types of denials are most important for each racial or ethnic group, with data from the 2008 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The second chapter, Temporal Causality and the Dynamics of Crime and Delinquency, uses a vector autoregressive (VAR) framework to study the causality between crime and delinquency rates with the U.S. aggregate data of 1987-2008. The third chapter, Does Curbing Corruption Complement Financial Development in Reducing Income Inequality?, uses OLS and instrumental variables (IV) techniques to analyze whether policies to control corruption as well as to promote financial development serve as complements in reducing income inequality with cross-sectional data of 30 Commonwealth countries over the period 1995--2008.