Search Results
Working Paper
Mortgage Design, Repayment Schedules, and Household Borrowing
How does the design of debt repayment schedules affect household borrowing? To answer this question, we exploit a Swedish policy reform that eliminated interest-only mortgages for loan-to-value ratios above 50%. We document substantial bunching at the threshold, leading to 5% less borrowing. Wealthy borrowers drive the results, challenging credit constraints as the primary explanation. We develop a model to evaluate the mechanisms driving household behavior and find that much of the effect comes from households experiencing ongoing flow disutility to amortization payments. Our results ...
Discussion Paper
Wealth Heterogeneity and Consumer Spending
Economists have become increasingly interested in the effects of household heterogeneity on macroeconomic dynamics. Changes in the distribution of income and wealth, coupled with advances in data and computation, have brought questions about how heterogeneity affects macroeconomic dynamics to the forefront of the discipline.