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Report
An Overview of the Nonprofit Foreclosure Counseling Industry in Philadelphia
The collapse of the housing market in the second half of the last decade created increased demand for counseling services to assist homeowners dealing with foreclosure. In Philadelphia, the nonprofit agencies that provide free housing counseling dealt with this surge in demand at the same time that funding became increasingly hard to secure. This paper provides a high-level overview of the state of the nonprofit foreclosure counseling industry in Philadelphia in the wake of the housing crash. The report includes information on the industry?s funding levels and sources, details what agencies ...
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
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
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
Foreclosure Rate Drops during COVID-19 despite Dip in On-Time Mortgage Payments
While on-time residential mortgage payments dropped drastically during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, most delinquent borrowers avoided foreclosure.
Journal Article
Spotlight on Research: The Distributional Impact of Negative Equity
The fallout from the recent meltdown in the housing market continues to afflict many homeowners today. A great deal of attention has been focused on the debilitating effects of a rise in foreclosures and falling house prices that accompanied the market downturn. The depressing effect of foreclosures on house prices has presented several challenges to homeowners. Declining home values have resulted in a number of homeowners owing more on their mortgage than their home is worth. Thus, the homeowners are saddled with negative equity, which is commonly referred to as ?being under water.? ...
Working Paper
A Shortage of Short Sales: Explaining the Underutilization of a Foreclosure Alternative
The Great Recession led to widespread mortgage defaults, with borrowers resorting to both foreclosures and short sales to resolve their defaults. I first quantify the economic impact of foreclosures relative to short sales by comparing the home price implications of both. After accounting for omitted variable bias, I find that homes selling as short sales transact at 9.2% to 10.5% higher prices on average than those that sell after foreclosure. Short sales also exert smaller negative externalities than foreclosures, with one short sale decreasing nearby property values by 1 percentage point ...
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 ...
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.
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: Some 30% of appraisals in our sample are exactly at the home price (with less than 10% of them below it). We lay out a basic theoretical framework to explain how appraisers? incentives within the institutional framework that governs mortgage lending lead to information loss in appraisals (that is, appraisals set equal to the contract price). Consistent with the theory, we observe a higher frequency of appraisal equal to contract price and ...