Mortgage lending on Native American reservations: Does a guarantee matter?

The Section 184 Indian Home Loan Guarantee Program provides lenders with a 100 percent guarantee for mortgage loans to Native Americans residing on reservations belonging to tribes that have chosen to participate in the program. We find that Native Americans residing on trust land whose tribes have adopted Section 184 have a marginally statistically significantly higher loan approval rate than Native Americans residing on trust land whose tribes have not adopted Section 184. However, the statistical significance disappears once tribe fixed effects are included in the analysis, suggesting that underlying tribe characteristics correlated with the adoption of Section 184 are more important determinants of access to credit than is Section 184 per se.