Attention Discrimination under Time Constraints: Evidence from Retail Lending

Abstract

Using proprietary loan screening data, we document that loan officers engage in “attention discrimination”: they exert less effort reviewing ex-ante disadvantage applicants, leading to higher rejection rates than otherwise justified by those applicants’ credit quality. Attention discrimination increases with the officers’ time constraints induced by quasi-random workload variations. When officer workload rises from the bottom to the top decile, they devote 70% less time to disadvantaged applicants, and the approval rate for those applicants declines by three-fifths. Our results indicate that attention constraints magnify discrimination, which provides policy implications about how to reduce discrimination in practice.