ABSTRACT
This chapter presents debate about how the research, advocacy, and regulatory communities can work effectively to eradicate unlawful discrimination from our mortgage lending markets. It addresses how best to assess the nature and extent of illegal discrimination in mortgage and related markets. The chapter considers how individual violators can best be pinpointed, presumably as a prelude to enforcement or compliance actions. It looks at how studies of institutional context, deterrence versus education approaches, and future research can aid in developing ways to more effectively eliminate lending discrimination. The chapter suggests that two initiatives—preapplication testing and mortgage scoring—warrant special merit in the pantheon of future directions in both research and enforcement. The key question regarding sample design is the way in which the researcher chooses to allocate a given number of tests over the mortgage lenders in the metropolitan area under investigation.
