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Working Paper
Intermediation Frictions in Debt Relief: Evidence from CARES Act Forbearance
We study the role of mortgage servicers in implementing the CARES Act mortgage forbearance program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite universal eligibility,we document that a significant number of federally backed mortgage borrowers be-come delinquent during the pandemic without successfully entering into a forbearance program, and that the relative frequency of these "missing" forbearances varies significantly across mortgage servicers for otherwise identical loans. Forbearance out-comes are systematically related to servicer characteristics including size, liquidity and ...
Working Paper
Locked In: Mobility, Market Tightness, and House Prices
Rising interest rates in 2022 significantly increased moving costs for homeowners with low fixed-rate mortgages, leading to a sharp drop in mobility. After accounting for biases from selective refinancing, we find mortgage rate "lock in"– the decline in moves due to the rising gap between market rates and homeowners' fixed rates– explains 44 percent of the drop in mortgage borrower mobility from 2021 to 2022. This effect primarily reflects fewer local moves, with only modest impacts on moves across labor market areas. Consistent with a housing search model, we show that under certain ...
Working Paper
Household Financial Decision-Making After Natural Disasters: Evidence from Hurricane Harvey
Hurricane Harvey brought more than four feet of rainfall to the Houston area in August 2017, leading to substantial flooding in many areas. Using regulatory data with detailed information on borrowing terms, we compare the borrowing response to Hurricane Harvey in parts of Houston that were more and less affected by flooding. We find that hurricane-affected households borrowed in a price-sensitive and time-limited manner, relying almost exclusively on promotional-rate credit cards and mortgage forbearance for new credit and repaying balances quickly. We find that conditional on flooding, ...
Working Paper
Borrowing and Spending in the Money: Debt Substitution and the Cash-out Refinance Channel of Monetary Policy
We show that the strong negative effect of higher mortgage rates on cash-out refinancing reflects substitution into other borrowing products, not large changes in total new household borrowing. We exploit an exogenous increase in long-term rates to show that, in the cross-section of outstanding mortgage rates, changes in cash-out and alternative borrowing are offsetting. Additionally, we instrument using monetary policy surprises to show that, over the period from 2006-2021, changes in cash-out refinancing are offset by alternative borrowing. Our results suggest that debt substitution ...
Report
Intermediation Frictions in Debt Relief: Evidence from CARES Act Forbearance
We study how intermediaries—mortgage servicers—shaped the implementation of mortgage forbearance during the COVID-19 pandemic and use servicer-level variation to trace out the causal effect of forbearance on borrowers. Forbearance provision varied widely across servicers. Small servicers and nonbanks, especially nonbanks with small liquidity buffers, facilitated fewer forbearances and saw a higher incidence of forbearance-related complaints. Easier access to forbearance substantially increased mortgage nonpayment but also reduced delinquencies outside of forbearance. Part of the liquidity ...