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Working Paper
Climate Risk, Insurance Premiums and the Effects on Mortgage and Credit Outcomes
As climate change exacerbates natural disasters, homeowners’ insurance premiums are rising dramatically. We examine the impact of premium increases on borrowers’ mortgage and credit outcomes using new data on home insurance policies for 6.7 million borrowers. We find that higher premiums increase the probability of mortgage delinquency, as well as prepayment (driven mainly by relocation). The results hold using a novel instrumental variable. The delinquency effect is greater for borrowers with higher debt-to-income ratios. Both delinquency and prepayment effects are present in both GSE ...
Working Paper
Financial Technology and the 1990s Housing Boom
The 1990s rollout of mortgage automated underwriting systems allowed for complex underwriting rules, cut processing time and raised house prices substantially. We show that locations exposed to initial adopters of Freddie Mac’s Loan Prospector system experienced an early housing boom due to a switch to statistically-informed underwriting rules. Loan Prospector adoption increased lending at high loan-to-income ratios by around 18 percent. Applying our estimated response to lenders who adopted later, we find that the rollout of new lending standards with the GSEs’ systems can explain more ...