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Since 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has required that federally insured banking institutions be evaluated on their records of helping to meet the credit needs of their local communities. In 1995, the agencies responsible for bank supervision substantially revised the regulations that implement the CRA. The revisions were intended to emphasize performance rather than process, to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden, and to increase consistency in CRA evaluations. Since 1995, "large" institutions, generally those with assets of $250 million or more, have been evaluated under a three-part test, whereas "small" institutions, generally those with assets of less than $250 million, have been subject to comparatively streamlined evaluations. ; In 2004 and 2005, the agencies put forth several proposals to extend the eligibility for streamlined examinations and an exemption from data reporting to more institutions by raising the asset-size threshold from $250 million to $500 million or $1 billion. A related issue that the agencies raised was how to define which bank activities in rural areas should be considered community development in CRA evaluations. In this article, the authors, having evaluated data to gain insight into the potential effects of these proposals, report the findings of their research.

In 2002 the Federal Reserve Board amended its Regulation C, which implements the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, to expand the types of information that lenders covered by the law must disclose to the public about their home-lending activities. The amendments are intended to improve the quality, consistency, and utility of the reported data and to keep the regulation in step with recent developments in home-loan markets. Data reported for 2004 are the first to reflect the changes in the reporting rules. This article presents a first look at these greatly expanded data and considers some of their implications for the continuing concerns about fair lending. The analysis highlights some key relationships revealed in an initial review of the types of data that are new for 2004. Some parts of the analysis focus on nationwide statistics, and others examine patterns across groups of lenders, loan products, and various groupings of applicants, borrowers, and neighborhoods. The authors explore, in particular and in some depth, the strengths and limitations of the information on loan pricing. They also describe how the new data are being used to enhance fair lending enforcement activities.