We assess the credit market impact of allowing mortgage "strip-down" as a foreclosure-prevention measure, where strip-down reduces the principal of underwater residential mortgages to the current market value of the property for homeowners in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Our identification is provided...

"In the depths of the Great Recession, a cancer nurse, a car dealership worker, and an insurance fraud specialist helped uncover the largest consumer crime in American history-a scandal that implicated dozens of major executives on Wall Street. They called it foreclosure fraud: millions of...

We explore several different explanations of the effect of foreclosures on neighboring properties using a dataset of transactions in Boston, for which we have rich data on the size and location of condominium associations. There is compelling evidence against a supply effect-nearby condo...

Die globale Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise nahm in den USA ihren Anfang und stürzte in ihrer Folge nicht nur die Vereinigten Staaten, sondern auch das ohnehin verschuldete Europa in eine Wirtschaftskrise gigantischen Ausmasses. Acht Millionen Jobs gingen allein in den USA zwischen 2007 und 2009...

We evaluate the effects of laws designed to protect borrowers from foreclosure. We find that these laws delay but do not prevent foreclosures. We first compare states that require lenders to seek judicial permission to foreclose with states that do not. Borrowers in judicial states are no more...

In this paper we analyse agricultural land prices in the state Brandenburg. Our objective is to understand the price formation in foreclosures. Knowledge of the impact of foreclosures is desirable for the determination of mortgage lending values. The effect of foreclosures can be decomposed into...

A central idea in macroeconomic theory is that negative price effects from the leverage-induced forced sale of durable goods can amplify negative shocks and reduce economic activity. We examine this idea by estimating the effect of U.S. foreclosures in 2008 and 2009 on house prices, residential...

This paper assesses the impact of the mortgage crisis on Chelsea, Massachusetts, a low-and moderate income community of 35,000 adjacent to Boston. After years of rapid growth, house prices started falling in 2005. According to our repeat-sales indices, by the end of 2009 prices had fallen by as...