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Working Paper
Student Loans and Homeownership
We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student's home state. A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public 4-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership. Validity tests suggest that the results are not ...
Discussion Paper
A New Measure of Housing Wealth in the Financial Accounts of the United States
This note introduces a new method for measuring the aggregate value of own-use residential real estate in the United States from 2001 to present.
Discussion Paper
The Effects of Credit Score Migration on Subprime Auto Loan and Credit Card Delinquencies
In the early stages of the pandemic, income support and forbearance programs led consumer loan delinquency rates to fall to near-record lows for borrowers across the credit score distribution. Since the second half of 2021, however, delinquency rates have risen, and by 2023:Q3, overall rates for auto and credit card loans had risen above their pre-pandemic levels.
Discussion Paper
A Trillion Dollar Question: What Predicts Student Loan Delinquency Risk?
Over the past ten years, the real amount of student debt owed by American households more than doubled, from about $450 billion to more than $1.1 trillion. As a result of this increase, in 2010 student loan debt surpassed credit card debt as the largest class of non-housing consumer debt.
Discussion Paper
Updating the Distributional Financial Accounts
In addition to incorporating 2020q2 data from the Financial Accounts, the 2020q2 release of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) includes three substantial updates. The most consequential is the incorporation of the newly released 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).
Working Paper
Introducing the Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States
This paper describes the construction of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs), a new dataset containing quarterly estimates of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, and provides the first look at the resulting data. The DFAs build on two existing Federal Reserve Board statistical products --- quarterly aggregate measures of household wealth from the Financial Accounts of the United States and triennial wealth distribution measures from the Survey of Consumer Finances --- to incorporate distributional information into a national accounting framework. The DFAs complement ...
Working Paper
Measuring Aggregate Housing Wealth : New Insights from an Automated Valuation Model
We construct a new measure of aggregate U.S. housing wealth based on Zillow's Automated Valuation Model (AVM). AVMs offer advantages over other methods because they are based on recent market transaction prices, utilize large datasets which include property characteristics and local geographic variables, and are updated frequently with little lag. However, using Zillow's AVM to measure aggregate housing wealth requires overcoming several challenges related to the representativeness of the Zillow sample. We propose methods that address these challenges and generate a new estimate of aggregate ...
Discussion Paper
Student Loans and Homeownership Trends
The increases in student loan debt and delinquencies over the past few years have raised concerns about whether heavy student loan debt burdens are making it more difficult for young households to become homeowners.
Working Paper
Student Loans, Access to Credit and Consumer Financial Behavior
This paper provides novel evidence that increased student loan debts, caused by rising tuitions, increase borrowers’ demand for additional consumer debt, while simultaneously restricting their ability to access it. The net effect of student loan debt on consumer borrowing varies by market, depending on whether the supply or demand channel dominates. In loosely underwritten credit markets, increased student loan debt causes borrowing to increase, while in tightly underwritten markets, increased student loan debt reduces the use of credit. These findings match predictions of a standard ...
Working Paper
How Well Did Social Security Mitigate the Effects of the Great Recession?
This paper quantifies the welfare implications of the U.S. Social Security program during the Great Recession. We find that the average welfare losses due to the Great Recession for agents alive at the time of the shock are notably smaller in an economy with Social Security relative to an economy without a Social Security program. Moreover, Social Security is particularly effective at mitigating the welfare losses for agents who are poorer, less productive, or older at the time of the shock. Importantly, in addition to mitigating the welfare losses for these potentially more vulnerable ...