Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:D53 

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.
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2018-10

Working Paper
Technological innovation in mortgage underwriting and the growth in credit, 1985–2015

The application of information technology to finance, or ?fintech,? is expected to revolutionize many aspects of borrowing and lending in the future, but technology has been reshaping consumer and mortgage lending for many years. During the 1990s, computerization allowed mortgage lenders to reduce loan-processing times and largely replace human-based assessments of credit risk with default predictions generated by sophisticated empirical models. Debt-to-income ratios at origination add little to the predictive power of these models, so the new automated underwriting systems allowed higher ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-11

Working Paper
Technological Innovation in Mortgage Underwriting and the Growth in Credit: 1985-2015

The application of information technology to finance, or ?fintech,? is expected to revolutionize many aspects of borrowing and lending in the future, but technology has been reshaping consumer and mortgage lending for many years. During the 1990s computerization allowed mortgage lenders to reduce loan-processing times and largely replace human-based assessment of credit risk with default predictions generated by sophisticated empirical models. Debt-to-income ratios at origination add little to the predictive power of these models, so the new automated underwriting systems allowed higher ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1816

Report
Risk Loving and Fat Tails in the Wealth Distribution

We study the dynamic properties of the wealth distribution in an overlapping generations model with warm-glow bequests and heterogeneous attitudes towards risk. Some dynasties of agents are risk averters, and others are risk lovers. Agents can invest in two types of Lucas trees. The two types of trees are symmetric in the sense that one type has a high return in states where the other has a return of zero. This symmetry allows risk averters to perfectly ensure their future income and eliminates aggregate uncertainty in the model. Furthermore, risk lovers take extreme portfolio positions, ...
Staff Report , Paper 662

Working Paper
Mixed Signals: Investment Distortions with Adverse Selection

We study how adverse selection distorts equilibrium investment allocations in a Walrasian credit market with two-sided heterogeneity. Representative investor and partial equilibrium economies are special cases where investment allocations are distorted above perfect information allocations. By contrast, the general setting features a pecuniary externality that leads to trade and investment allocations below perfect information levels. The degree of heterogeneity between informed agents' type governs the direction of the distortion. Moreover, contracts that complete markets dampen the impact ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2019-044

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 ...
Working Papers , Paper 2013

Working Paper
Collateral Reuse and Financial Stability

The isolated effects of collateral reuse on financial stability are ambiguous and understudied. While greater collateral reuse can guarantee more payments with fewer assets, it can also increase the exposure to potential drops in collateral price. To analyze these tradeoffs, we develop a financial network model with endogenous asset pricing, multiple equilibria, and equilibrium selection. We find that more collateral reuse decreases the likelihood of the worst equilibrium (crisis), with varying effects depending on the network structure. Therefore, collateral reuse can unambiguously improve ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2025-035

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

Working Paper 26 items

Journal Article 4 items

Report 4 items

Discussion Paper 2 items

Conference Paper 1 items

Speech 1 items

show more (1)

FILTER BY Author

Chang, Jin-Wook 7 items

Chuan, Grace 4 items

Sultanum, Bruno 4 items

Bethune, Zachary 3 items

Darst, Matt 3 items

Trachter, Nicholas 3 items

show more (58)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

E44 11 items

G21 9 items

D52 8 items

D82 5 items

E52 5 items

show more (49)

FILTER BY Keywords

Collateral 3 items

Financial markets 3 items

Financial network 3 items

Fire sale 3 items

Monetary policy 3 items

Systemic risk 3 items

show more (134)

PREVIOUS / NEXT