In many countries, house prices are overvalued according to price-to-income ratios. We propose that the borrower s ability to pay through a mortgage is a long-run house price fundamental and find convincing evidence by means of cointegration tests, granger causality, and an elasticity of house...

Many households have only one major asset, a house, which is usually financed through a mortgage contract. One of the most important financial decisions a household has to make is therefore the choice of mortgage type. These can be broadly described as falling into one of two categories: the...

After a decade under federal control, the Belgian regions became responsible for the mortgage interest and capital deduction (MICD) in 2015. One region drastically reduced the average subsidy while another left it unaffected. Exploiting this variation in a difference in differences design, we...

We study the effect of an increase in capital requirements for residential mortgages on mortgage rates and house prices. We exploit a unique quasi-experiment in which affected banks faced an increase in risk weights of five percentage points. Using a difference-in-difference estimator we find...