Each year, on the third Monday in January, we remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—a man whose courage shaped the civil rights movement that changed our nation and whose lifelong dream was to create a more just society. In some ways, the present may seem far from Dr. King’s dream.

With contributions by Natalie Patten

This is the second installment of our three-part series on discrimination in mortgage lending and the analytical techniques that Summit Consulting uses to detect it. Last week, we introduced redlining and showed examples of analyses we perform to identify potential redlining practices by a given lender. This week, we will explore how we identify and measure pricing discrimination.

With contributions by Natalie Patten

Today’s post kicks off a three-part series on discrimination in mortgage lending and the analytical techniques that Summit Consulting uses to detect it. We use Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, internal data from banks, and underwriting documents to detect and estimate potential predatory-lending practices for our clients.

As the 2020 fall semester wraps up, Summit Consulting is excited to highlight its relationship with Virginia Tech’s Computational Modeling and Data Analytics (CMDA) program and its work with CMDA students on their capstone project.

Summit Consulting and its subcontractors successfully partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to develop and implement an approach to business modernization across the department.

In this two part pay equity blog series, Summit Consulting Senior Manager Corey West (who leads Summit's internal pay equity analyses) and Salt Hill's Alan Salzberg discuss the must haves for conducting comprehensive and reliable pay equity studies. The first post in the series was about three must-have elements for comprehensive, cost-effective pay equity assessments:. This second post is a brief case study of how to use data to analyze pay equity.

Pay is a function of several employee characteristics. How can we know if pay inequities are attributable to race, gender, or age? Here, Summit explains how to answer this question using regression modeling, predictive analytics, and statistical matching. As a Senior Manager with extensive experience in pay-equity analytics and a founding member of Summit’s Diversity Equity & Inclusion group, I lead the annual review of Summit’s internal salaries. Below, we take a closer look at each step of a pay-equity review.

Summit’s mission-oriented finance team recently attended the annual Opportunity Finance Network conference from November 9 to November 12, 2020. Due to ongoing concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held in a virtual format for the first time in its history. In total, the Summit team attended 41 breakout sessions over the four-day conference. These sessions covered different aspects of the community development financial institution (CDFI) industry related to the conference’s overall theme of finance justice. This three-part blog series discusses the highlights and key takeaways from the conference’s main themes:

With contributions by Teresa Kline

While Mechanical Turk (“MTurk”) offers definite benefits to researchers over traditional respondent platforms—it’s a significantly faster and less expensive data-collection method—there are some concerns about data collected via MTurk. In this last installment of our series, we’ll explore three main issues:  

• Respondent “non-naivete” 
• Representativeness and selection bias  
• Response quality  
  

Summit’s mission-oriented finance team recently attended the annual Opportunity Finance Network conference from November 9 to November 12, 2020. Due to ongoing concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held in a virtual format for the first time in its history. In total, the Summit team attended 41 breakout sessions over the four-day conference. These sessions covered different aspects of the community development financial institution (CDFI) industry related to the conference’s overall theme of finance justice. This three-part blog series discusses the highlights and key takeaways from the conference’s main themes:

Summit’s mission-oriented finance team recently attended the annual Opportunity Finance Network conference from November 9 to November 12, 2020. Due to ongoing concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held in a virtual format for the first time in its history. In total, the Summit team attended 41 breakout sessions over the four-day conference. These sessions covered different aspects of the community development financial institution (CDFI) industry related to the conference’s overall theme of finance justice. This three-part blog series discusses the highlights and key takeaways from the conference’s main themes: