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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 21.
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Discussion Paper
Who Has Been Evicted and Why?
More than two million American households are at risk of eviction every year. Evictions have been found to cause prolonged homelessness, worsened health conditions, and lack of credit access. During the COVID-19 outbreak, governments at all levels implemented eviction moratoriums to keep renters in their homes. As these moratoriums and enhanced income supports for unemployed workers come to an end, the possibility of a wave of evictions in the second half of the year is drawing increased attention. Despite the importance of evictions and related policies, very few economic studies have been ...
Working Paper
Villains or Scapegoats? The Role of Subprime Borrowers in Driving the U.S. Housing Boom
An expansion in mortgage credit to subprime borrowers is widely believed to have been a principal driver of the 2002–2006 U.S. house price boom. By contrast, this paper documents a robust, negative correlation between the growth in the share of purchase mortgages to subprime borrowers and house price appreciation at the county-level during this time. Using two different instrumental variables approaches, we also establish causal evidence that house price appreciation lowered the share of purchase loans to subprime borrowers. Further analysis using micro-level credit bureau data shows that ...
Discussion Paper
Expected Home Price Increases Accelerate over the Short Term but Remain Stable over the Medium Term
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s 2022 SCE Housing Survey shows that expected changes in home prices in the year ahead increased relative to the corresponding timeframe in the February 2021 survey, while five-year expectations remained unchanged. Households reported that they would be less likely to buy if they were to move compared to the year-ago survey, marking the first annual decline since the series began in 2014. This drop was driven by current renters, who were much less likely to buy compared to renters in the 2021 survey. Renters also reported that they expect rents to be ...
Working Paper
Villains or Scapegoats? The Role of Subprime Borrowers in Driving the U.S. Housing Boom
An expansion in mortgage credit to subprime borrowers is widely believed to have been a principal driver of the 2002?06 U.S. house price boom. Contrary to this belief, we show that the house price and subprime booms occurred in different places. Counties with the largest home price appreciation between 2002 and 2006 had the largest declines in the share of purchase mortgages to subprime borrowers. We also document that the expansion in speculative mortgage products and underwriting fraud was not concentrated among subprime borrowers.
Report
The Federal Reserve’s Market Functioning Purchases
In March 2020, massive customer selling of U.S. Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed dealers’ capacity to intermediate trades, contributing to a marked deterioration of market functioning. The Federal Reserve promptly took numerous steps to address the market disruptions, including the initiation of market functioning purchases of Treasury securities and agency MBS. Purchases quickly expanded to over $100 billion per day as the Fed announced plans to buy securities “in the amounts needed” to support market ...
Discussion Paper
Are People Overconfident about Avoiding COVID-19?
More than six months into the COVID-19 outbreak, the number of new cases in the United States remains at an elevated level. One potential reason is a lack of preventative efforts either because people believe that the pandemic will be short-lived or because they underestimate their own chance of infection despite it being a public risk. To understand these possibilities, we elicit people’s perceptions of COVID-19 as a public health concern and a personal concern over the next three months to the following three years within the May administration of the Survey of Consumer Expectations ...
Report
Defragmenting Markets: Evidence from Agency MBS
Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have historically traded in separate forward markets. We study the consequences of this fragmentation, showing that market liquidity endogenously concentrated in Fannie Mae MBS, leading to higher issuance and trading volume, lower transaction costs, higher security prices, and a lower primary market cost of capital for Fannie Mae. We then analyze a change in market design—the Single Security Initiative—which consolidated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS trading into a single market in June 2019. We find that ...
Discussion Paper
MBS Market Dysfunctions in the Time of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic elevated financial market illiquidity and volatility, especially in March 2020. The mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market, which plays a critical role in the housing market by funding the vast majority of U.S. residential mortgages, also suffered a period of dysfunction. In this post, we study a particular aspect of MBS market disruptions by showing how a long-standing relationship between cash and forward markets broke down, in spite of MBS dealers increasing the provision of liquidity. (See our related staff report for greater detail.) We also highlight an innovative ...
Report
Dealers and the Dealer of Last Resort: Evidence from the Agency MBS Markets in the COVID-19 Crisis
When market disruptions started in March 2020, dealers maintained the usual liquidity provision in the agency MBS market by taking cash inventory and hedging inventory risk with forward contracts. However, cash and forward prices significantly diverged and began to converge only after the Federal Reserve deployed nonstandard purchase operations to promptly take MBS off dealers’ balance sheets. Further cross-dealer analyses point to supplemental leverage ratio requirements as major constraints on dealers’ balance sheets. Customers’ selling increased when price divergence reverted, ...
Working Paper
Defragmenting Markets: Evidence from Agency MBS
Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have historically traded in separate forward markets. We study the consequences of this fragmentation, showing that market liquidity endogenously concentrated in Fannie Mae MBS, leading to higher issuance and trading volume, lower transaction costs, higher security prices, and a higher rate of return on securitization for Fannie Mae. We then analyze a change in market design – the Single Security Initiative – which consolidated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS trading into a single market in June 2019. We find that ...