In the last three decades, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has managed to replace its welfare-based urban housing system with a market-based housing provision scheme. With such significant housing policy changes, the PRC has successfully expanded urban home ownership and impressively...

A growing literature suggests that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and government sponsored enterprises' affordable housing goals, may have caused the subprime crisis. The conclusions drawn in this literature, for the most part, have been based on associations...

We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the...

Most research on the run-up in home prices before the Great Recession has focused on types of excessive demand—loose lending, foreign savings, loose monetary policy, speculation, bank deregulation, federal housing subsidies, etc. The focus on excess demand led to fatalism about the collapse in...

The major cause of the financial crisis in the U.S. was the collapse of housing and mortgage markets resulting from an accumulation of an unprecedented number of weak and risky Non-Traditional Mortgages (NTMs). These NTMs began to default en mass beginning in 2006, triggering the collapse of the...