Search Results
Working Paper
The impact of the home valuation code of conduct on appraisal and mortgage outcomes
Supersedes Working Paper 14-23. The accuracy of appraisals came into scrutiny during the housing crisis, and a set of policies and regulations was adopted to address the conflict-of-interest issues in the appraisal practices. In response to an investigation by the New York State Attorney General?s office, the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC) was agreed to by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Using unique data sets that contain both approved and nonapproved mortgage applications, this study provides an empirical examination of the impact of the HVCC on ...
Working Paper
“Don't Know What You Got Till It’s Gone” — The Effects of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on Mortgage Lending in the Philadelphia Market
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, has served as an important tool to foster access to financial services for lower-income communities across the country. This study provides new evidence on the effectiveness of CRA on mortgage lending by focusing on a large number of neighborhoods that became eligible and ineligible for CRA credit in the Philadelphia market because of an exogenous policy shock in 2014. The CRA effects are more evident when a lower-income neighborhood loses its CRA coverage, which leads to a 10 percent or more decrease in purchase originations by ...
Ready for the Pandemic? Household Debt before the COVID-19 Shock
Before the pandemic, shares of delinquencies had already been growing in consumer finance loans, credit card debt, student loans and auto loans. And delinquencies can vary greatly among states.
Working Paper
Consumption in the Great Recession: The Financial Distress Channel
During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the US varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. Our message is that household financial health matters for understanding this relationship. Two facts are essential for our finding: (1) the decline in house prices led to an increase in household financial distress (FD) prior to the decline in income during the recession, and (2) at the zip-code level, the prevalence of FD prior to the recession was positively correlated with house-price declines at the onset of the recession. We measure the power of the ...
Working Paper
Appraising Home Purchase Appraisals
Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraised values are rarely below the purchase contract price. We argue that institutional features of home mortgage lending cause much of the information in appraisals to be lost: some 30 percent of recent appraisals are exactly at the home price (with less than 10 percent below it). We lay out a novel, basic theoretical framework to explain how lenders? and appraisers? incentives lead to information loss in appraisals (that is, appraisals set equal to the contract price). Such information loss is ...
Working Paper
Information losses in home purchase appraisals
Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraisals are rarely below the transaction price. We exploit a unique data set to show that the mortgage application process creates an incentive to substitute the transaction price for the true appraised value when the latter is lower. We relate the frequency of information loss (appraisals set equal to transaction price) to market conditions and other factors that plausibly determine the degree of distortion. Information loss in appraisals may increase the procyclicality of housing booms and busts.
Working Paper
A cost-benefit analysis of judicial foreclosure delay and a preliminary look at new mortgage servicing rules
Since the start of the financial crisis, we have seen an extraordinary lengthening of foreclosure timelines, particularly in states that require judicial review to complete a foreclosure but also recently in nonjudicial states. Our analysis synthesizes findings from several lines of research, updates results, and presents new analysis to examine the costs and benefits of judicial foreclosure review. Consistent with previous studies, we find that judicial review imposes large costs with few, if any, offsetting benefits. We also provide early analysis of the new mortgage servicing rules enacted ...
Working Paper
Second Home Buyers and the Housing Boom and Bust
Record-high second home buying (homeowners acquiring nonprimary residences) was a central feature of the 2000s boom, but the macroeconomic effects remain an open question partly because reliable geographic data is currently unavailable. This paper constructs local data on second home buying by merging credit bureau data with mortgage servicing records. The identification strategy exploits the fact that the vacation share of housing from the 2000 Census is predictive of second home origination shares during the boom years, while also uncorrelated with other boom-bust drivers including proxies ...
Working Paper
Household Financial Distress and the Burden of “Aggregate” Shocks
The goal of this paper is to show that household-level financial distress (FD) varies greatly, meaning there is unequal exposure to macroeconomic risk, and that FD can increase macroeconomic vulnerability. To do this, we first establish three facts: (i) regions in the U.S. vary significantly in their "FD-intensity," measured either by how much additional credit households therein can access, or in how delinquent they typically are on debts, (ii) shocks that are typically viewed as "aggregate" in nature hit geographic areas quite differently, and (iii) FD is an economic "preexisting ...
Working Paper
Home Equity in Retirement
Retired homeowners dissave more slowly than renters, which suggests that homeownership a?ects retirees? saving decisions. We investigate empirically and theoretically the life-cycle patterns of homeownership, housing and nonhousing assets in retirement. Using an estimated structural model of saving and housing decisions, we ?nd, ?rst, that homeowners dissave slowly because they prefer to stay in their house as long as possible but cannot easily borrow against it. Second, the 1996-2006 housing boom signi?cantly increased homeowners? assets. These channels are quantitatively signi?cant; without ...