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Jel Classification:R30 

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

Working Paper
Flipping the Housing Market

We add arbitraging middlemen -- investors who attempt to profit from buying low and selling high -- to a canonical housing market search model. Flipping tends to take place in sluggish and tight, but not in moderate, markets. There is the possibility of multiple equilibria. In one equilibrium, most, if not all, transactions are intermediated, resulting in rapid turnover, a high vacancy rate, and high housing prices. In another equilibrium, few houses are bought and sold by middlemen. Turnover is slow, few houses are vacant, and prices are moderate. Moreover, flippers can enter and exit en ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 301

Journal Article
The FHA and the GSEs as countercyclical tools in the mortgage markets

The authors examine the connection between government mortgage programs and economic outcomes during and after the financial crisis. They find a strong correlation between counties that participated more heavily in Federal Housing Administration (FHA)/Veterans Affairs (VA) and government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage lending before the crisis and better economic outcomes during and after the crisis. Although the financial crisis was a substantial shock to all counties, those more reliant on FHA/VA or GSE lending experienced smaller increases in unemployment rates; smaller declines in ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue 24-3 , Pages 28-40

Report
Local banks, credit supply, and house prices

I study the effects of an increase in the supply of local mortgage credit on local house prices and employment by exploiting a natural experiment from Switzerland. In mid-2008, losses in U.S. security holdings triggered a migration of dissatisfied retail customers from a large, universal bank, UBS, to homogeneous local mortgage lenders. Mortgage lenders located close to UBS branches experienced larger inflows of deposits, regardless of their investment opportunities. Using variation in the geographic distance between UBS branches and local mortgage lenders as an instrument for deposit growth, ...
Staff Reports , Paper 874

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
How Taxes and Required Returns Drove Commercial Real Estate Valuations over the Past Four Decades

We document the evolution of U.S. tax law regarding commercial real estate (CRE) since 1975, noting changes in income and capital gains tax rates and tax depreciation methods. The most prominent changes were the 1981 and 1986 Tax Acts, but numerous significant changes occurred in the last dozen years. We then compute the present value of tax depreciation per dollar of acquisition price and an effective tax rate for CRE. We explain the quarterly variation in CRE capitalization rates using an error correction framework and find that the long run estimates are statistically significant in the ...
Working Papers , Paper 1703

Working Paper
A tractable city model for aggregative analysis

An analytically tractable city model with external increasing returns is presented. The equilibrium city structure is either monocentric or decentralized. Regardless of which structure prevails, intracity variation in endogenous variables displays exponential decay from the city center, where the decay rates depend only on parameters. Given population, the equilibrium of the model is generically unique. Tractability permits explicit expressions for when a central business district (CBD) will emerge in equilibrium, how external increasing returns affect the steepness of downtown rent ...
Working Papers , Paper 15-37

Working Paper
Location as an Asset

The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs. We argue that it is useful to conceptualize the location choice of individuals as a decision to invest in a ?location asset?. This asset has a cost equal to the location?s rent, and a payoff through better job opportunities and, potentially, more human capital for the individual and her children. As with any asset, savers in the location asset transfer resources into the future by going to expensive locations with good future opportunities. In contrast, borrowers transfer resources to the ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 12

Working Paper
Fintech Lending and Mortgage Credit Access

Following the 2008 financial crisis, mortgage credit tightened and banks lost significant mortgage market share to nonbank lenders, including to fintech firms recently. Have fintech firms expanded credit access, or are their customers similar to those of traditional lenders? Unlike in small business and unsecured consumers lending, fintech mortgage lenders do not have the same incentives or flexibility to use alternative data for credit decisions because of stringent mortgage origination requirements. Fintech loans are broadly similar to those made by traditional lenders, despite innovations ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-47

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