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Jel Classification:R30 

Working Paper
A Crisis of Missed Opportunities? Foreclosure Costs and Mortgage Modification During the Great Recession

We investigate the impact of Great Recession policies in California that substantially increased lender pecuniary and time costs of foreclosure. We estimate that the California Foreclosure Prevention Laws (CFPLs) prevented 250,000 California foreclosures (a 20% reduction) and created $300 billion in housing wealth. The CFPLs boosted mortgage modifications and reduced borrower transitions into default. They also mitigated foreclosure externalities via increased maintenance spending on homes that entered foreclosure. The CFPLs had minimal adverse side effects on the availability of mortgage ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-053

Newsletter
Interest-only mortgages and speculation in hot housing markets

Even as housing markets have temporarily shut down across the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic, housing remains a key sector that contributes disproportionately to fluctuations in overall economic activity and that will likely play an important role as the economy reopens. Interest in this market among research economists and policymakers intensified after the exceptional boom and bust in housing between 2003 and 2008. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we describe research in Barlevy and Fisher (2020)1 that examined patterns in the kinds of mortgages homebuyers took out in different cities during ...
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 439 , Pages 6

Journal Article
GSE guarantees, financial stability, and home equity accumulation

Before 2008, the government?s ?implicit guarantee? of the securities issued by the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to practices by these institutions that threatened financial stability. In 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency placed these GSEs into conservatorship. Conservatorship was intended to be temporary but has now reached its tenth year, and policymakers continue to weigh options for reform. In this article, the authors assess both implicit and explicit government guarantees for the GSEs. They argue that adopting a legislatively defined ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue 24-3 , Pages 11-27

Working Paper
Evaluating the Benefits of a Streamlined Refinance Program

Mortgage borrowers who have experienced employment disruptions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are unable to refinance their loans to take advantage of historically low market rates. In this article, we analyze the effects of a streamlined refinance (“refi”) program for government-insured loans that would allow borrowers to refinance without needing to document employment or income. In addition, we consider a cash-out component that would allow borrowers to extract some of the substantial housing equity that many have accumulated in recent years.
Working Papers , Paper 20-21

Working Paper
Factors Affecting Regional Bank Health and Supervisory Rating: An Exploration

Local commercial real estate conditions are positively correlated with the health of regional banks (assets between $10 billion and $100 billion), as measured by the composite confidential supervisory rating. Among other variables, return on assets is positively correlated with our proxy of bank health, but size and capital ratio are negatively correlated. Among the different components of the rating, the management rating has the most influence on the composite rating.
Working Papers , Paper 26-02

Working Paper
Do Banks Price Flood Risk in Mortgage Origination: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in New Orleans

This paper uses a large-scale redrawing of flood zone maps for the City of New Orleans in 2016 to identify how banks respond to changes in perceived flood risk in residential mortgage origination. Using geo-coding, we separate loan-level data on mortgage originations into treatment versus control groups based on how individual properties were affected by the map changes. We find banks charged interest rates that were roughly 6 basis points higher for mortgages on treated properties that were removed from the special floods zones as a result of the map changes. In addition, lower loan-to-value ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2025-081

Working Paper
Have Distressed Neighborhoods Recovered? Evidence from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

During the 2007-2009 housing crisis, concentrations of foreclosed and vacant properties created severe blight in many cities and neighborhoods. The federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was established to help mitigate distress in hard-hit areas by funding the rehabilitation or demolition of troubled properties. This paper analyzes housing market changes in areas that received investments during the second round of NSP funding, focusing on seven large urban counties. Grantees used NSP to invest in census tracts with high rates of distressed and vacancy properties, and tracts that ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2015-16

Working Paper
Lease Expirations and CRE Property Performance

This study analyzes how lease expirations affect the performance of commercial real estate (CRE) properties and how these patterns changed during the COVID-19 crisis. Even before the pandemic, lease expirations were associated with a notable increase in the downside risk to a property’s occupancy or income, particularly in weaker property markets. These risks became more pronounced during the pandemic, driven mostly by office properties. During the pandemic, the adverse effect of lease expirations on office occupancy increased more than 50 percent overall, and it doubled for offices in ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-10

Working Paper
Explosive Dynamics in House Prices? An Exploration of Financial Market Spillovers in Housing Markets Around the World

Asset prices in general, and real house prices in particular, are often characterized by a nonlinear data-generating process which displays mildly explosive behavior in some periods. Here, we investigate the emergence of explosiveness in the dynamics of real house prices and the role played by asset market spillovers. We establish a timeline of periodically-collapsing episodes of explosiveness for a panel of 23 countries from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas? International House Price Database (Mack and Martnez-Garca (2011)) between first quarter 1975 and fourth quarter 2015 using the ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 342

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Bhutta, Neil 5 items

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Leung, Charles Ka Yui 4 items

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