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Jel Classification:G51 

Report
Racial Differences in Mortgage Refinancing, Distress, and Housing Wealth Accumulation during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated racial disparities in U.S. mortgage markets. Black, Hispanic, and Asian borrowers were significantly more likely than white borrowers to miss payments due to financial distress, and significantly less likely to refinance to take advantage of the large decline in interest rates spurred by the Federal Reserve’s large-scale mortgage-backed security (MBS) purchase program. The wide-scale forbearance program, introduced by the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, provided approximately equal payment relief to all distressed borrowers, ...
Current Policy Perspectives

Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score

What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand-in for a market assessment of a person’s unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a person’s type via Bayesian updating. We show how dynamic reputation can incentivize repayment without monetary costs of default beyond the administrative cost of filing for bankruptcy. Importantly, we show how an economy with credit scores implements the same equilibrium allocation. We estimate the model using both ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-39

Working Paper
The Impact of Minority Representation at Mortgage Lenders

We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Minority borrowers are less likely to complete mortgage applications, have completed applications approved, and to ultimately take-up a loan. These disparities are significantly reduced when minority borrowers work with minority loan officers. Minority borrowers working with minority loan officers also have lower default rates. Our results ...
Working Papers , Paper 2207

Working Paper
Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market

We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving naive consumers with higher unpaid balances. Naive consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2023-007

Working Paper
Saving and Wealth Accumulation among Student Loan Borrowers: Implications for Retirement Preparedness

Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households' balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on retirement preparation. We demonstrate that families holding student loan debt later in life have less savings than their similarly educated peers without such debt. However, these comparisons are misleading if the goal is to characterize the experience of the typical student borrower, as they fail to ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2022-019

Report
Lessons Learned from Mortgage Borrower Policies and Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article reviews the aid offered to the roughly 50 million homeowners with mortgages included in a forbearance program, and the Federal Reserve’s actions that pushed down mortgage rates, allowing many mortgage holders to reduce their monthly payments by refinancing. We deem these policies to be quite effective in relieving financial distress and allowing homeowners to stay in their homes, especially in contrast with the policies pursued during the Great Recession. We emphasize that these policies in part worked because of rising housing prices and home equity, before and during the ...
Current Policy Perspectives

Discussion Paper
The Fed’s Balance Sheet Runoff: The Role of Levered NBFIs and Households

In a Liberty Street Economics post that appeared yesterday, we described the mechanics of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “runoff” when newly issued Treasury securities are purchased by banks and money market funds (MMFs). The same mechanics would largely hold true when mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are purchased by banks. In this post, we show what happens when newly issued Treasury securities are purchased by levered nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs)—such as hedge funds or nonbank dealers—and by households.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220412

Discussion 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 amount of housing equity that many have accumulated in recent years.
Policy Hub , Paper 2020-08

Working Paper
Financial Repercussions of SNAP Work Requirements

This paper considers the credit response of individuals after the implementation of new work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) benefits using a large nationally representative sample of credit records. It does so by exploiting county-level variation in the implementation of work requirements after the Great Recession in a difference-in-differences design. We find that the implementation of new SNAP work requirements leads more people to seek out new credit and leads to an increase in credit account openings. New work requirements also result in an increase in total ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2022-030

Discussion Paper
Consumer Credit Card Payment Deferrals During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In response to the economic hardships stemming from COVID-19, many U.S. card-issuing banks offered measures to assist their customers who were financially affected by the pandemic. Unlike previous disaster assistance programs that were typically short in duration and localized, the COVID-19 pandemic affected millions of consumers across the country for a protracted period of time and required application of broad-based relief measures. These measures, along with federal and state stimulus and benefit payments, provided some stability to many consumers’ financial circumstances during ...
Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers

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