“Did the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Lead to Risky Lending?”

The first sentence of the abstract of this paper reads “Yes, it did.”  Please don’t take this as support for whackier theories of the cause of the crisis, but as to whether this was an amplifying mechanism, well it seems it was.  I have never myself been obsessed with this question, or pushing the significant relevance of the CRA theories, but earlier this received so much attention in the blogosphere, and it led to so many excoriations, I thought I would pass this new result along.

An ungated copy is here.