When the Federal Housing Finance Agency (“FHFA”) was appointed conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it was the first use of the conservatorship authority under the Housing and Economic [...]
A modest approximation by homebuyers leads house prices to display three features that are present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean [...]
We apply unique loan level data from New Century Financial Corporation, a major subprime lender, to explore whether attributes and committee assignments of Congressional Representatives were associated with access to [...]
We show the importance of the collateral lending channel for small business employment over the past decade. Small businesses in areas with greater increases in house prices experienced stronger growth [...]
The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates [...]
We document that contractual disclosures by intermediaries during the sale of mortgages contained false information about the borrower's housing equity in 7–14% of loans. The rate of misrepresented loan default [...]
This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of [...]
Historical anecdotes of new investors being drawn into a booming asset market, only to suffer when the market turns, abound. While the role of investor contagion in asset bubbles has [...]
Regional shocks are an important feature of the U.S. economy. Households' ability to self-insure against these shocks depends on how they affect local interest rates. In the United States, most [...]
At $26 trillion America’s housing stock is the largest asset class in the world, worth a little more than the country’s stockmarket. America’s mortgage-finance system, with $11 trillion of debt, [...]