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Journal Article
Default rates on prime and subprime mortgages: differences & similarities
For the past several years, the news media have carried countless stories about soaring defaults among subprime mortgage borrowers. Although concern over this segment of the mortgage market is certainly justified, subprime mortgages only account for about onequarter of the total outstanding mortgages in the United States. The remaining 75 percent are prime loans that are made to borrowers with good credit, who fully document their income and make traditional down payments. While default rates on prime loans are significantly lower than those on subprime loans, they are also increasing ...
Journal Article
Economic Perspectives special issue on payments fraud: an introduction
This article provides an overview of this special issue of Economic Perspectives, which presents selected papers based on the proceedings of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's eighth annual Payments Conference, Payments Fraud: Perception Versus Reality, held on June 5?6, 2008.
Journal Article
Transforming payment choices by doubling fees on the Illinois Tollway
Using data from the Illinois Tollway, the authors study the effectiveness of a particular application of pricing incentives, in conjunction with a mass-marketing campaign, to foster adoption of electronic toll collection. Dissecting the consumer response by income level, the authors reveal interesting heterogeneity of consumer payment choice in this environment.
Working Paper
Market-based loss mitigation practices for troubled mortgages following the financial crisis
The meltdown in residential real-estate prices that commenced in 2006 resulted in unprecedented mortgage delinquency rates. Until mid-2009, lenders and servicers pursued their own individual loss mitigation practices without being significantly influenced by government intervention. Using a unique dataset that precisely identifies loss mitigation actions, we study these methods?liquidation, repayment plans, loan modification, and refinancing?and analyze their effectiveness. We show that the majority of delinquent mortgages do not enter any loss mitigation program or become a part of ...
Working Paper
How did the 2003 dividend tax cut affect stock prices and corporate payout policy?
We examine the effects of the 2003 dividend tax cut on U.S. stock prices and corporate payout policies. First, using an event-study methodology, we compare the performance of U.S. stocks to that of other securities that should not have benefited from the tax change. We find that U.S. large-cap and small-cap indexes do not outperform their European counterparts, nor REIT stocks, over the event windows, suggesting little if any aggregate stock market effect from the tax change. In cross-sectional analysis, high-dividend stocks outperformed low-dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the ...
Newsletter
Mortgage Refinancing during the Great Recession: The Role of Credit Scores
This article examines whether deteriorating credit scores may have posed a barrier to mortgage refinancing during the Great Recession of 2008?09 and its immediate aftermath. The authors find that in general, as long as borrowers kept up with their mortgage payments, their credit scores did not fall significantly over this period. Hence, credit scores are not likely to explain why certain borrowers with sufficient home equity did not refinance their mortgages.
Working Paper
Expectations of risk and return among household investors: Are their Sharpe ratios countercyclical?
Data obtained from special questions on the Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes over several years are used to analyze stock market beliefs and portfolio choices of household investors. Consistent with other survey results, expected future returns appear to be extrapolated from past realized returns. The data also indicate that expected risk and return are strongly influenced by economic prospects. When investors believe macroeconomic conditions are more expansionary, they tend to expect both higher returns and lower volatility, which implies that household Sharpe ratios are procyclical. ...
Working Paper
Debit card and cash usage: a cross-country analysis
During the last decade, debit card transactions grew rapidly in most advanced countries. While check usage declined and has almost disappeared in some countries, the stock of currency in circulation has not declined as fast. We use panel estimation techniques to analyze the change in transactional demand for cash resulting from greater usage of debit cards in 13 countries from 1988 to 2003. We are able to disentangle cash?s store of value function from its payment function by separating cash into three denomination categories. We find that the demand for low denomination notes and coins ...
Newsletter
Consumer Credit Trends by Income and Geography in 2001–12
As economists have tried to understand the causes of the Great Recession and its consequences for households and firms, a consensus has emerged: The severity of the recession was amplified by the rapid buildup in consumer credit leading up to it and the subsequent credit retrenchment. However, the credit cycle played out unevenly among individuals of different financial means and across different parts of the U.S. Thus, one potential key to understanding the Great Recession is documenting how credit trends varied across the distribution of income and across geography, as well as across the ...
Journal Article
The When, What and Where of Consumer Debt: The View from Cook County
Consumer debt grew rapidly in the years leading up to the Great Recession, and contracted sharply in its immediate aftermath. This credit cycle played out unevenly among households with different financial means and in different parts of the country. While much attention has been paid to mortgages, other debt categories, such as automobile and student, play an important role in household finances. Consequently, we analyze trends in both mortgage and non-mortgage debt across income groups during the period surrounding the Great Recession.