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Working Paper
Foreclosure Externalities and Vacant Property Registration Ordinances
This paper tests the effectiveness of vacant property registration ordinances (VPROs) in reducing negative externalities from foreclosures. VPROs were widely adopted by local governments across the United States during the foreclosure crisis and facilitated the monitoring and enforcement of existing property maintenance laws. We implement a border discontinuity design combined with a triple-difference specification to overcome policy endogeneity concerns, and we find that the enactment of VPROs in Florida more than halved the negative externality from foreclosure. This finding is robust to a ...
Working Paper
The credit card debt puzzle: the role of preferences, credit risk, and financial literacy
We use the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to revisit what is termed the credit card debt puzzle: why consumers simultaneously co-hold high-interest credit card debt and low-interest assets that could be used to pay down this debt. This dataset contains unique information on intelligence, financial literacy, and preferences, while also providing a complete picture of households? balance sheets. Relative to individuals with no credit card debt but positive liquid assets, individuals in the puzzle group have higher discount rates, slightly lower financial literacy scores, and very ...
Newsletter
On the Move: Mortgage Basics
Buying a home is a major financial decision, and for young people in particular the entire process can seem overwhelming. Learn about mortgages and the steps people can take early in life to prepare themselves financially to buy a home, in this February 2022 issue of Page One Economics: Focus on Finance.
Report
Insolvency after the 2005 bankruptcy reform
Using a comprehensive panel dataset on U.S. households, we study the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), the most substantive reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States since the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The 2005 legislation introduced a means test based on income to establish eligibility for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and increased the administrative requirements to file, leading to a rise in the opportunity cost and, especially, the financial cost of filing for bankruptcy. We study the effects of the reform on bankruptcy, insolvency, ...
Working Paper
High-Skilled Services and Development in China
We document that the employment share of high-skill-intensive services is much lower in China than in countries with similar gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We build a model of structural change with goods and low- and high-skill-intensive services to account for this observation. We find that large distortions limit the size of high-skill-intensive services in China. If they were removed, both high-skill-intensive services and GDP per capita would increase considerably. We document a strong presence of state-owned enterprises in high-skill-intensive services and argue that this ...
Journal Article
A Look at Detroit's Affordable Housing Market
The foreclosure crisis had a significant impact on Detroit's home ownership rates. The 2000 and 2010 censuses indicate that the homeownership rate in Detroit was 54.9 percent and 51.1 percent, respectively. According to the 2011-2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, the current rate is below 50 percent. Detroit now has more renters than homeowners. As more residents move from homeownership, increased focus is being placed on the city?s rental housing market and the findings are not entirely favorable.
Journal Article
San Antonio Tackles Foreclosure
A look-to city for programs to help low- and moderate-income working families build assets, San Antonio has taken on the challenge of homeownership preservation.
Working Paper
Crises in the Housing Market: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Lessons
The global financial crisis of the past decade has shaken the research and policy worlds out of their belief that housing markets are mostly benign and immaterial for understanding economic cycles. Instead, a growing consensus recognizes the central role that housing plays in shaping economic activity, particularly during large boom and bust episodes. This article discusses the latest research regarding the causes, consequences, and policy implications of housing crises with a broad focus that includes empirical and structural analysis, insights from the 2000's experience in the United ...
Working Paper
Mortgage-default research and the recent foreclosure crisis
This paper reviews recent research on mortgage default, focusing on the relationship of this research to the recent foreclosure crisis. Research on defaults was advanced both theoretically and empirically by the time the crisis began, but economists have moved the frontier further by improving data sources, building dynamic optimizing models of default, and explicitly addressing reverse causality between rising foreclosures and falling house prices. Mortgage defaults were also a key component of early research that pointed to subprime and other privately securitized mortgages as fundamental ...
Journal Article
Mortgage Data Help Paint Foreclosure Picture
As foreclosure and delinquency rates escalate, community organizations, counseling agencies and policymakers need good-quality data to understand foreclosure patterns and mitigate foreclosure losses to individuals and communities. To that end, the Federal Reserve System has aggregated mortgage performance data, created dynamic maps and made them available to the public