Refinancing a mortgage is often one of the biggest and most important financial decisions that people make. Borrowers need to choose the interest rate differential at which to refinance and, when that differential is reached, they need to take the steps to refinance before rates change again....

We develop a unique paired loan dataset containing information on multiple conventional conforming mortgage loans to examine home equity extraction decisions over the 2000–2006 period. The main question addressed is how much households borrow when refinancing their current mortgage debt...

The papers in this special issue of the Annals were first presented at the Transportation and Economic Development Conference held in Little Rock, Arkansas in March of 2006. The conference was attended by officials from U.S. Department of Transportation agencies, academic scholars and industry...

In this paper we examine the incentives for lenders to steer borrowers into piggyback loan structures to circumvent regulations requiring primary mortgage insurance (PMI) for loans with loan to value ratios (LTV) above 80%. Our empirical analysis focuses on propensity score matched portfolios of...

We document the effect of policy-induced credit supply on fueling asset prices that lead to financial crises and broad economic outcomes. By comparing loans that fall under the current conforming loan limit (CLL) to those under the old limit last year in a difference-in-differences setting, we...

This paper documents that mortgage servicers increased modification rates by approximately 8 percent for delinquent loans located in a district whose representative was a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 111th Congress. We document that...

During the housing bust many homeowners found themselves “underwater�—the amount they owed on their mortgages exceeded the value of the associated property—and they either could not or possibly chose not to stay current on their mortgage payments. As a consequence,...