Professor Ross gave the opening address at the Dallas Federal Reserve conference on “Intent vs. Impact: Evaluating Individual- and Community-Based Programs” on November 16th and 17th.
He summarized much of his research on race, neighborhood and mortgage lending over the last few years. Professor Ross argued that systematic unexplained racial differences in high cost lending and foreclosure exist and that those differences are associated with the concentration of minority borrowers and loans from low income and minority neighborhoods at high cost/high risk lenders. However, Professor Ross also argued that lending to vulnerable, low income and minority borrowers had little to do with severity of the foreclosure crisis itself given that the majority of foreclosure differences were explained by risk factors rather than income or neighborhood, and the dollar volume of foreclosures nationally was primarily driven by middle and upper income borrowers living in suburban neighborhoods. His presentation slides can be found at
http://www.dallasfed.org/cd/events/2015/15intent.cfm
and substantial amount of the research discussed is contained in Bayer, Ferreira and Ross (NBER Working Papers #19020 and #20762).