A Comment on "Discriminatory Lending: Evidence from Bankers in the Lab?"
Brock and De Haas (2023) study the effect of randomising applicant gender in small business loan applications that are reviewed by loan officers at a Turkish bank in a lab-in-the-field experiment based on real-life applications. The main results are: first, that loan approval rates are not gendered (direct discrimination); second loan officers are 6 percentage point (26%) more likely to condition loan approval to a guarantor when the applicant is a female rather than a male (indirect discrimination). In our computational replication we obtain the manuscript results. In addition, a robustness replication shows that the main results are partly driven by the role of loan types, job seniority and population differences among cities.
JEL-Klassifikation: C93, G21, G32, J16, L25, L26, O16