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Journal Article
Retail sweeps and reserves
Journal Article
Housing market headwinds
The housing sector has been one of the weakest links in the economic recovery, and the latest data continue to show only modest improvement. One obstacle to a pickup in housing demand has been tight mortgage credit standards. Indeed, loan standards for borrowers with lower credit scores have shown few signs of easing. Still, as the share of new mortgages financed in the private market has started to rise, access to credit may improve.
Working Paper
Innovations in Mortgage Markets and Increased Spending on Housing
Innovations in the mortgage market since the mid-1990s have effectively reduced a number of financing constraints. Coinciding with these innovations, we document a significant change in the propensity for households to own their homes, as well as substantial increases in the share of household income devoted to housing. These changes in housing expenditures are especially large for those groups that faced the greatest financial constraints, and are robust across the changing composition of households and their geographic location. We present evidence that young, constrained households may ...
Journal Article
Why are housing inventories low?
Inventories of homes for sale have been slow to bounce back since the 2007?09 recession, despite steady house price appreciation since January 2012. One probable reason why many homeowners are not putting their homes on the market is that their properties may still be worth less than the value of their mortgages, which would leave them owing additional money after a sale. In other cases, homeowners may simply be hoping that house prices will continue to rise, allowing them to recover lost equity.
Journal Article
The 1997 Nobel Prize in economics
Journal Article
Off-site monitoring of bank holding companies
Journal Article
House price dynamics and the business cycle
Working Paper
Returns on illiquid assets: are they fair games?
The simplest tests of capital market efficiency are tests of the fair game model: conditional expected returns less the interest rate are equal to zero. The fair game model is thought to obtain only when markets are perfectly liquid. We show that this conjecture is false. In a model of the housing market where heterogeneous agents must search for partners in order to trade, excess returns on housing wealth are fair games if, as is appropriate, returns are defined to include shadow prices measuring illiquidity.
Journal Article
Do supervisory rating standards change over time?
Supervisory BOPEC ratings were assigned to bank holding companies (BHCs) during the years 1987 to 2004 as a summary of their overall performance and level of supervisory concern. In this article, we examine the stability of the BOPEC ratings assigned over that period. We model supervisory ratings using balance sheet variables, and our analysis suggests that BOPEC rating standards varied over time. Supervisors seem to have applied more stringent rating standards from 1989 to 1992, a period marked by a recession and a large degree of distress in the banking sector. Rating standards then eased ...