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Report
Housing busts and household mobility: an update
This paper provides updated estimates of the impact of three financial frictions?negative equity, mortgage lock-in, and property tax lock-in?on household mobility. We add the 2009 wave of the American Housing Survey (AHS) to our sample and also create an improved measure of permanent moves in response to Schulhofer-Wohl?s (2011) critique of our earlier work (2010). Our updated estimates corroborate our previous results: Negative equity reduces household mobility by 30 percent, and $1,000 of additional mortgage or property tax costs reduces household mobility by 10 to 16 percent. ...
Report
Housing busts and household mobility
Using two decades of American Housing Survey data from 1985 to 2005, we estimate the influence of negative home equity and rising mortgage interest rates on household mobility. We find that both factors lead to lower, not higher, mobility rates over time. The effects are economically large -- mobility is almost 50 percent lower for owners with negative equity in their homes. This finding does not imply that current concerns over defaults and homeowners having to relocate are entirely misplaced. It does indicate that, in the past, the mortgage lock-in effects of these two factors were dominant ...
Journal Article
Housing busts and household mobility: an update
Interest in the relationship between household mobility and financial frictions, especially frictions associated with negative home equity, has grown following the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets. With prices falling 30 percent nationally, negative equity greatly expanded across many markets. More recently, the decline in mortgage rates along with various policy interventions to encourage refinancing at historically low rates suggests the need to also revisit mortgage interest rate lock-in effects, which are likely to become important once Federal Reserve interest rate policy ...