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Working Paper
Concentration in Mortgage Markets: GSE Exposure and Risk-Taking in Uncertain Times
When home prices threaten to decline, large investors may attempt to prop up prices by fostering new lending. We show this motive increased acquisitions of risky mortgages by the government-sponsored enterprises in the first half of 2007. When home prices threaten to decline, large mortgage investors can benefit from fostering new lending that boosts demand. We ask whether this benefit contributed to the growth in acquisitions of risky mortgages by the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) in the first half of 2007. We find that it helps explain the variation of this growth across regions ...
Working Paper
Economic Diversity and the Resilience of Cities
We show how local worker flow adjustment margins yield a theory-consistent sufficient statistic approximating the welfare effects of local shocks. Furthermore, we isolate a city’s insurance value as this approximation’s second-order term. Leveraging rich labor flows data across occupations, industries, and cities in France, we estimate spatial and non-spatial flows responses to local labor demand shocks. Less economically diverse French cities experience deeper contractions in gross outflows following negative shocks. In contrast, more economic concentration begets a modestly larger ...
Working Paper
Concentration in Mortgage Markets: GSE Exposure and Risk-Taking in Uncertain Times
When home prices threaten to decline, lenders bearing more of a community’s mortgage risk have an incentive to combat this decline with new lending that boosts demand. We test whether this incentive drove the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to guarantee riskier mortgages in early 2007, as the chance of substantial declines grew from small to significant. To identify the effect we relate new risky lending to regional variation in the GSEs’ exposure and the interaction of this variation with home-price elasticity. We focus on the GSEs’ discretion across potential purchases by ...