Small Business Loan Turndowns, Personal Wealth, and Discrimination*

We examine the impact of personal wealth on small business loan turndowns across demographic groups. Information on home ownership, home equity, and personal net worth, in combination with a rich set of explanatory variables, furthers our understanding of the credit market experiences of small businesses across demographic groups. We find substantial unexplained differences in denial rates between African-American-, Hispanic-, Asian-, and white-owned firms. We find that greater personal wealth is associated with a lower probability of loan denial. However, even after controlling for personal wealth, large differences in denial rates across demographic groups remain.