Recent increases in interest rates, combined with the rapid rise in house prices over the past two years, have eroded the affordability of homeownership. This note provides evidence that home purchase borrowing by below-average income households has fallen precipitously in 2022

This paper estimates the effect of home ownership on individuals' unemployment. Because of higher moving costs, home owners will be less willing than renters to re- locate for work and could therefore face longer unemployment spells. Estimation is complicated by the endogeneity of ownership, as...

This article presents findings from the HMDA data through 2016. The number of mortgage originations in 2016 rose 13 percent from 2015. Black and Hispanic white borrowers increased their share of home-purchase loans for the third straight year. The share of mortgages originated by nondepository,...

We study the effect of interest rates on the housing market by taking advantage of a sudden and unexpected price change in a large government mortgage program. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insures most mortgages to lower-downpayment, lower credit score borrowers, including a majority...

We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the...

The contrast between the labor market and house prices during the pandemic has been stark. In this note, we document a strong positive relationship between forbearance takeup and house price growth at the county level, controlling for the unemployment rate and other factors

We estimate a neighborhood choice model using 2014 American Community Survey data to investigate the degree to which new housing supply can improve housing affordability. In the model, equilibrium rental rates are determined so that the number of households choosing each neighborhood is equal to...