Using the adoption of Zombie Property Law (ZL) across several US states, we show that increased lender accountability in the foreclosure process affects mortgage lending decisions and standards. Difference-in-differences estimations using a state border design show that ZL incentivizes lenders...

It is crucial to better understand the U.S. residential mortgage market, where the global financial crisis originated. In this paper, we develop an infinite-horizon continuous-time structural model to study the effects of the long- standing and widespread Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)...

Do banks delegate their lending decisions to local branches? We examine this question in the mortgage market. Using a novel dataset connecting bank branch managers' decisions to their career histories, we find that managers' past experiences with mortgage approval and pricing significantly...

The Farm Credit System (FCS) is an important source of financing for many rural communities in the United States. As a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), the FCS has a mandate to provide credit to farmers, ranchers, and aquatic producers at fair market terms. In recent decades, the System's...

This study highlights the importance and impacting channels of financial literacy on household mortgage decisions in a market with the substantial existence of informal borrowing systems. Using panel data from a Chinese household survey, we find more financially sophisticated households are of...

In response to the Global Financial Crisis (2007–2009), financial institutions exposed to the subprime mortgage market faced a loss of confidence by investors and generalized stress in funding markets, restricting financial institutions access to lending. Stigma at the Federal Reserve (the...

In the years preceding the Great Depression (1929–1933), home prices and outstanding mortgage debt grew substantially. Low interest rates and lax lending standards fueled widespread real estate speculation. House prices and housing construction peaked between 1925 and 1927 and then fell...

The Federal Home Loan Banks are the less well-known siblings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Since these government-sponsored enterprises were created in 1932, changes in housing finance markets have rendered largely irrelevant their original purpose of increasing the availability of mortgages....

With a ratio of household debt to gross disposable income above 150%, households in Luxembourg are among the most indebted in Europe. A high level of debt exacerbates the sensitivity of household net worth to changes in house prices, which can increase the severity of economic downturns. In this...

Housing research is one of the hot topics in many countries. This paper provides a quick review of the housing economics research in the US, Sweden, Latvia, China, Corsica, and Italy published in this special issue. Bao and Shah studied the effects of home-sharing platforms in general and the...

During the late 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We provide evidence that these maps were not the primary source used by the FHA to create their “redlining” maps...

We study third-party loan guarantees in a model in which lenders can screen, learn loan quality over time and can sell loans before maturity when in need of liquidity. Loan guarantees improve market liquidity and reduce lending standards, with a positive overall welfare effect. Guarantees...

The final transition to escrow accounts model in financing residential construction was the highlight of the mortgage market in 2020. The model provided state guarantee for the citizens investing in housing at the construction stage. The reduction of credit rates and implementation of the state...

Motivated by the assessment of racial discrimination in mortgage pricing, we introduce a new methodology for comparing the menus of options borrowers face based on their choices. First, we show how standard regression-based approaches for assessing discrimination in the menus context can lead to...

We study how the structure of housing finance affects the transmission of monetary policy shocks. We document three main facts: first, the features of residential mortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries; second, and according to a wide range of indicators, the...

Successful privatization must be accompanied by the complete removal of privileges and any public policy mission. Bank behavior changes rapidly as profit maximation replaces the bureaucratic objective function. Once privileges are granted, they are difficult to remove. Therefore, privatization...

Using a novel combination of mortgage datasets, we analyze the effects of two policy levers that influence the scope of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's (GSEs) involvement in the U.S. residential mortgage market. First, we find that small changes in mortgage guarantee fees charged by the GSEs were...

We show that banks expand mortgage lending in the home states of the Senate Banking Committee chairs, and the effect is more pronounced when the senators' same-party House representatives are facing tight re-election races. Banks suffer worse mortgage asset quality but their overall...

Prior to government interventions in the U.S. mortgage market during the 1930s, private institutions arose to improve the efficiency of the market and produce more affordable mortgage products. These institutions included mortgage companies that made significant use of mortgage securitization,...

When home prices threaten to decline, lenders bearing more of a community's mortgage risk have an incentive to combat this decline with new lending that boosts demand. We test whether this incentive drove the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to guarantee riskier mortgages in early 2007,...