We use individual level credit bureau data to document which individuals saw the biggest rise in household debt from 2000 to 2007 and the biggest rise in defaults from 2007 to 2010. Growth in household debt from 2000 to 2007 was substantially larger for individuals with the lowest initial credit...

Academic research, government inquiries, and press accounts show extensive mortgage fraud during the housing boom of the mid-2000s. We explore a particular type of mortgage fraud: the overstatement of income on mortgage applications. We define “income overstatement” in a zip code as the...

Treating fraudulently overstated income on mortgage applications as true income leads to incorrect conclusions on the nature of the mortgage credit supply expansion toward marginal borrowers from 2002 to 2005. A positive gap between zip-code level income growth calculated from mortgage...

Treating fraudulently overstated income on mortgage applications as true income leads to incorrect conclusions on the nature of the mortgage credit supply expansion toward marginal borrowers from 2002 to 2005. A positive gap between zip-code level income growth calculated from mortgage...

Academic research, government inquiries, and press accounts show extensive mortgage fraud during the housing boom of the mid-2000s. We explore a particular type of mortgage fraud: the overstatement of income on mortgage applications. We define "income overstatement" in a zip code as the growth...

We use individual level credit bureau data to document which individuals saw the biggest rise in household debt from 2000 to 2007 and the biggest rise in defaults from 2007 to 2010. Growth in household debt from 2000 to 2007 was substantially larger for individuals with the lowest initial credit...