Search Results
Working Paper
The Marginal Effect of Government Mortgage Guarantees on Homeownership
The U.S. government guarantees a majority of residential mortgages, which is often justified as a means to promote homeownership. In this paper we use property-level data to estimate the effect of government mortgage guarantees on homeownership, by exploiting variation of the conforming loan limits (CLLs) along county borders. We find substantial effects on government guarantees, but find no robust effect on homeownership. This finding suggests that government guarantees could be considerably reduced with modest effects on homeownership, which is relevant for housing finance reform plans that ...
Discussion Paper
Diplomas to Doorsteps: Education, Student Debt, and Homeownership
Evidence overwhelmingly shows that the average earnings premium to having a college education is high and has risen over the past several decades, in part because of a decline in real average earnings for those without a college degree. In addition to high private returns, there are substantial social returns to having a well-educated citizenry and workforce. A new development that may have important longer-term implications for education investment and for the broader economy is a significant change in the financing of higher education. State funding has declined markedly over the past two ...
Working Paper
Rushing into American Dream? House Prices, Timing of Homeownership, and Adjustment of Consumer Credit
In this paper we use a large panel of individuals from Consumer Credit Panel dataset to study the timing of homeownership as a function of credit constraints and expectations of future house price. Our panel data allows us to track individuals over time and we model the transition probability of their first home purchase. We find that in MSAs with highest quartile house price growth, the median individual become homeowners earlier by 5 years in their lifecycle compared to MSAs with lowest quartile house price growth. The result suggests that the effect of expectation dominates the effect of ...
Working Paper
Financing Affordable and Sustainable Homeownership with Fixed-COFI Mortgages
The 30-year fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage (or ?traditional fixed-rate mortgage?) was a substantial innovation when first developed during the Great Depression. However, it has three major flaws. First, because homeowner equity accumulates slowly during the first decade, homeowners are essentially renting their homes from lenders. With this sluggish equity accumulation, many lenders require large down payments. Second, in each monthly mortgage payment, homeowners substantially compensate capital markets investors for the ability to prepay. The homeowners might have better uses for this ...
Speech
Presentation of the 2006 NHS Gale Cincotta Neighborhood Partnership Award and Reflections on the Chicago Fed's Work with NHS and the Home Ownership Preservation Initiative
Remarks by Michael H. Moskow President and Chief Executive Officer Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago 2007 NHS Annual Awards Dinner - Navy Pier Grand Ballroom, Chicago, IL. March 1, 2007
Southeast Housing Market and COVID-19
Considering the devastating effects the COVID-19 pandemic is having on the economic landscape, we can think of no better time to revive our Real Estate Research blog. Atlanta Fed staff, often in partnership with researchers at other Reserve Banks, are continually working to track and assess COVID-19-related developments as they unfold in the housing and mortgage markets.
Working Paper
Student Loans and Homeownership
We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student's home state. A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public 4-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership. Validity tests suggest that the results are not ...
Working Paper
Single-Family REITs and Local Housing Markets
We study the rise of single-family real estate investment trusts (SF-REITs) using a novel property-level dataset. SF-REITs tend to buy homes in neighborhoods near city centers, where housing supply is relatively elastic and residents are on the lower rungs of the homeownership ladder. Exploiting spatial differences, we find that SF-REIT growth modestly raises prices and increases overall housing supply, with individual ownership rising at a similar rate. However, we find no evidence that SF-REITs reduce house purchase financing accessibility—mortgage approval rates and borrower credit ...
Working Paper
Illiquid Homeownership and the Bank of Mom and Dad
Housing is the largest asset in U.S. household portfolios, and first-time homebuyers increasingly rely on parental transfers. This paper quantifies the contribution of parental transfers to the homeownership rate of young households. I build and estimate a life-cycle overlapping generations model with housing, where adult children and parents interact without commitment. I find that parental transfers account for 13 percentage points (27%) of young households' homeownership. Transfers from wealthy parents not only help households overcome borrowing constraints, but also help sustain ...