Jenna Gonzales

School: DePaul University

Major: Social Justice

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-5y6z-ch89

Jenna L. Gonzales recently graduated summa cum laude from DePaul University with a BA in Economics and a certificate in Geographic Information Systems. She has been given an Outstanding Senior Award by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and has been spotlighted by the Department of Economics. Jenna will continue her education in fall at the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business to pursue an MS in Economics and Policy Analysis.

 She is broadly interested in using her economic knowledge and data analysis skills to research topics related to equity. She has researched topics including racial disparities in the mortgage market, food deserts, and accessibility of COVID-19 testing locations.

Jenna held several positions in her undergraduate career at DePaul University. She was a Research Assistant who contributed to a historical economics project by creating maps and analyzing information from newspaper archives. She was also a Research Assistant for a digital humanities project in which she created and visualized data related to the Chicago Public Library. Jenna worked as a Teaching Assistant for undergraduate econometrics. In addition, she has served as a Peer Research Tutor at DePaul University’s library since her first year and recently worked on a project to analyze data about the trends and types of questions asked at the library’s Help Desk. In her free time, Jenna enjoys going on jogs with her pit bull or watching movies with her friends.

Racial Disparities in Access to Mortgages

Abstract

Despite the explicit prohibition of racial discrimination in the mortgage market, concerns about racial disparities in access to mortgages persist. Using loan-level data from 2018, I explore the relationship between race and mortgage application outcomes in the United States. To econometrically estimate how race is associated with mortgage access, two outcome variables are used: the probability of a loan application being denied and the interest rate of an originated loan. I find that black applicants are more likely to be denied than white applicants and that black borrowers are charged higher interest rates on originated loans than white borrowers.