The Equal Credit Opportunity Act: An Evaluation

Abstract

This article presents the results from an empirical study of the impact of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) on the consumer credit industry. The results indicate that the ECOA has not negatively affected the quality of credit decisions by prohibiting the use of the primary discriminators—age and marital status. However, the results also indicate that consumer credit companies would make considerably poorer credit decisions if the ECOA would be interpreted or amended to extend the prohibited bases of discrimination to include other secondary factors currently being used by companies in the industry.