The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

We evaluate the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. HAMP increased intensity of renegotiations and prevented substantial number of foreclosures but reached just one-third of its...

This paper shows, for the first time, how liquidity infusions from government bailouts affect loan modification in the mortgage market. The design of the Pooling and Service Agreement leads mortgage servicers to prefer foreclosure to modification when the servicers are liquidity constrained....

We follow a representative panel of millions of consumers in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017 and document several facts on the long-term effects of the Great Recession. There were about six million foreclosures in the ten-year period after Lehman's collapse. Owners of multiple homes accounted for 25%...

We evaluate the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. HAMP increased intensity of renegotiations and prevented substantial number of foreclosures but reached just one-third of its...

We evaluate the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. HAMP increased intensity of renegotiations and prevented substantial number of foreclosures but reached just one-third of its...

Using loan-level mortgage data merged with consumer credit records, we examine the ability of the government to impact mortgage refinancing activity and spur consumption by focusing on the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). The policy relaxed housing equity constraints by extending...

Using information on advertising and mortgages originated by subprime lenders, we study whether advertising helped consumers find cheaper mortgages. Lenders that advertise more within a region sell more expensive mortgages, measured as the excess rate of a mortgage after accounting for borrower,...

We document the fact that servicers have been reluctant to renegotiate mortgages since the foreclosure crisis started in 2007, having performed payment-reducing modifications on only about 3 percent of seriously delinquent loans. We show that this reluctance does not result from securitization:...