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Working Paper
The Impact of Missed Payments and Foreclosures on Credit Scores
This paper debunks the common perception that ?foreclosure will ruin your credit score.? Using individual-level data from a credit bureau matched with loan-level mortgage data, it is estimated that the very first missed mortgage payment leads to the biggest reduction in credit scores. The effects of subsequent loan impairments are increasingly muted. Post-delinquency foreclosures have only a minimal effect on credit scores. Moreover, credit scores improve substantially a year after borrowers experience 90-day delinquency or foreclosure. The data supports one possible explanation of this ...
Working Paper
Keeping up with the Jansens: Causal Peer Effects on Household Spending, Beliefs and Happiness
CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: van Rooij, Coibion, Georgarakos, Candia, Gorodnichenko. How does perceived relative income affect household behavior and well-being? We use a randomized information experiment in a representative panel of Dutch households to generate exogenous variation in beliefs about peers' income. Lower perceived relative standing shifts expenditure toward durable goods but we find little evidence of an increase in total spending. Higher perceived relative income increases socializing and substantially raises happiness, while lower relative income increases subsequent employment. ...
Working Paper
Time Use and the Efficiency of Heterogeneous Markups
What are the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity across firms? In standard monopolistic competition models, such heterogeneity implies inefficiency even in the presence of free entry. We enrich the standard model with heterogeneous firms so that preferences are non-separable in off-market time and market consumption and show that this changes the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity. In this context, homogeneity of markups is neither necessary nor sufficient for efficiency. The marginal cost of the marginal firm is weakly inefficiently high when off-market time and market ...
Working Paper
Reentering asset poverty after an exit: evidence from the PSID
In order to be successful at improving household's financial self-sufficiency and stability, asset-building policies must be designed to prevent households from falling back into asset poverty once they exit it. This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1994 to 2007 to analyze the influence of life events, demographics and financial behaviors on the duration out of asset poverty. We find evidence that suggests there are structural barriers to asset acquisition. Asset accumulation at levels equal to nine months worth of income at the income poverty level or greater is ...
Working Paper
Mortgage Borrowing and the Boom-Bust Cycle in Consumption and Residential Investment
This paper studies the transmission of the major shocks in the U.S. housing market in the 2000s to consumption and residential investment. Using geographically disaggregated data, I show that residential investment is more responsive to these shocks than consumption, as measured by elasticities and the implied contributions to GDP growth. I develop a structural life-cycle model featuring multiple types of housing investment to understand the large responses of residential investment. Consistent with the microdata, the model generates lumpy debt accumulation, lumpy housing investment and a ...
Working Paper
Mortgage Choice in the Housing Boom: Impacts of House Price Appreciation and Borrower Type
The U.S. housing boom during the first part of the past decade was marked by rapid house price appreciation and greater access to mortgage credit for lower credit-rated borrowers. The subsequent collapse of the housing market and the high default rates on residential mortgages raise the issue of whether the pace of house price appreciation and the mix of borrowers may have affected the influence of fundamentals in housing and mortgage markets. This paper examines that issue in connection with one aspect of mortgage financing, the choice among fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages. This ...
Working Paper
Wealth Effects out of Financial and Housing Wealth: Cross Country and Age Group Comparisons
To explore the link between household consumption and wealth, we use a new source of harmonized microdata (Luxembourg Wealth Study). We investigate whether there are differences in wealth effects from different types of wealth and across age groups. We consider three countries: Canada, Italy and Finland. We find that the overall wealth effect from housing is stronger than the effect from financial wealth for the three countries in the sample. Additionally, in accordance with the life-cycle theory of consumption, we find the housing wealth effect to be significantly lower for younger ...
Working Paper
Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces
We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives. Cohabitation has ...
Working Paper
Tax Credits and the Debt Position of U.S. Households
This paper investigates the effect of tax credit receipt on the outstanding indebtedness of households. In particular, we use data on zip code level indebtedness to explore whether debt levels and past due amounts change more dramatically during tax refund season in those zip codes where households receive greater Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC) refunds. We see a substantial decline in debt past due in high tax credit zip codes during tax refund season indicating that some recipient households use tax refunds to repair their balance sheets. At the same ...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Effects of Neighborhood Change on Incumbent Families
A number of prominent studies examine the long-run effects of neighborhood attributes on children by leveraging variation in neighborhood exposure through household moves. However, much neighborhood change comes in place rather than through moving. Using an urban economic geography model as a basis, this paper estimates the causal effects of changes in neighborhood attributes on long-run outcomes for incumbent children and households. For identification, we make use of quasi-random variation in 1990-2000 and 2000-2005 skill specific labor demand shocks hitting each residential metro area ...