This dissertation consists of two essays studying banking and (racial) inequality. Its first part is a short essay, titled ``Racial Disparities in the U.S. Mortgage Market.'' This essay empirically examines the extent and potential drivers of racial disparities in the U.S. mortgage market. Using new data, we present three main findings. First, we document racial disparities in mortgage access between minority and otherwise-identical White borrowers, even within the same bank and loan officer. In contrast, we show that racial disparities in mortgage costs are close to zero. Second, we uncover that the use of purportedly race-blind automated underwriting algorithms is associated with substantially smaller disparities in mortgage access, while individual factors—specifically, loan officers' race and whether borrowers' race is observed at application—do not seem to matter much. Third, we show that the use of automated underwriting algorithms is associated with slightly larger disparities in mortgage costs, while individual factors make little difference. Our approach and findings represent another step toward understanding the factors driving racial disparities and discriminatory forces in the U.S. mortgage market. Structural or organizational factors may also play a role and have been overlooked by previous studies. We study one of these factors in the next chapter. The second essay is titled ``The Effect of Minority Bank Ownership on Minority Credit.'' This work constructs the first matched data on bank ownership, employees, and mortgage borrowers to study the effect of racial minority bank ownership on minority credit. We address previous missing data and measurement error issues by introducing numerous novel sources and tools. Using our newly constructed data, we present four findings. First, minority-owned banks specialize in same-race mortgage lending. Almost 70 percent of their mortgages go to borrowers of the same race as their owners. Second, the effect of minority bank ownership on minority credit is large and exceeds that of minority loan officers. We find that minority borrowers applying for mortgages at banks whose owners are of the same minority group are nine percentage points more likely to be approved than otherwise identical minority borrowers at nonminority banks. This effect is over six times that of a minority loan officer. Third, evidence from plausibly exogenous bank failures suggests that the effect of minority bank ownership might reflect an expansion rather than a reallocation of credit to minorities. Fourth, the within-bank default rate of same-race borrowers is much lower than that of otherwise-identical borrowers of other races at minority banks. These findings are consistent with minority bank ownership reducing information asymmetry and inconsistent with owners' preferences driving the observed effects on minority credit. The evidence is also consistent with an organizational phenomenon, suggesting that the effect of banks' organizational culture and design on minority credit might outweigh that of banks' individual employees.