Search Results
Journal Article
Mortgage Data Help Paint Foreclosure Picture
As foreclosure and delinquency rates escalate, community organizations, counseling agencies and policymakers need good-quality data to understand foreclosure patterns and mitigate foreclosure losses to individuals and communities. To that end, the Federal Reserve System has aggregated mortgage performance data, created dynamic maps and made them available to the public
Working Paper
The Rise and Fall of Consumption in the 2000s
U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since the turn of the millennium, but the causes of these fluctuations are still imperfectly identified. We quantify the relative impact on consumption growth of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, expectations, foreclosures, inequality, and refinancings for four subperiods: the ?dot-com recession? (2001-2003), the ?subprime boom? (2004-2006), the Great Recession (2007-2009), and the ?tepid recovery? (2010-2012). We document that the explanatory power of different factors varies by subperiods, implying that a ...
Working Paper
Fewer Vacants, Fewer Crimes? Impacts of Neighborhood Revitalization Policies on Crime
The relationship between neighborhood physical environment and social disorder, particularly crime, is of critical interest to urban economists and sociologists, as well as local governments. Over the past 50 years, various policy interventions to improve physical conditions in distressed neighborhoods have also been heralded for their potential to reduce crime. Urban renewal programs in the mid-20th century and public housing redevelopment in the 1990s both subscribed to the idea that signs of physical disorder invite social disorder. More recently, the federal Neighborhood Stabilization ...
Journal Article
Foreclosure Prevention Efforts Continue in Texas Metro Areas
Although the level of seriously delinquent mortgages in Texas is slightly improved from one year ago (see the accompanying article), such mortgages are still at very high levels in the metro areas. For example, over 30,000 households are at least 90 days delinquent on their mortgage in the four-county Dallas-Fort Worth metro area as of December 2010.
Journal Article
Foreclosure Rate Drops during COVID-19 despite Dip in On-Time Mortgage Payments
While on-time residential mortgage payments dropped drastically during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, most delinquent borrowers avoided foreclosure.
Report
An Overview of the Nonprofit Foreclosure Counseling Industry in Philadelphia
The collapse of the housing market in the second half of the last decade created increased demand for counseling services to assist homeowners dealing with foreclosure. In Philadelphia, the nonprofit agencies that provide free housing counseling dealt with this surge in demand at the same time that funding became increasingly hard to secure. This paper provides a high-level overview of the state of the nonprofit foreclosure counseling industry in Philadelphia in the wake of the housing crash. The report includes information on the industry?s funding levels and sources, details what agencies ...
Discussion Paper
Distressed Residential Real Estate: Dimensions, Impacts, and Remedies
On October 5, 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Rockefeller Institute of Government co-hosted the conference ?Distressed Residential Real Estate: Dimensions, Impacts, and Remedies.? This post not only makes available a compendium of the findings of the conference, but also updates and extends some of the analysis presented. In particular, we look across states to assess the differential impacts of judicial and non-judicial processes to resolve the foreclosure crisis. Controlling for the peak percentage of loans that were seriously delinquent, we find that non-judicial states ...
Working Paper
Foreclosure Externalities and Vacant Property Registration Ordinances
This paper tests the effectiveness of vacant property registration ordinances (VPROs) in reducing negative externalities from foreclosures. VPROs were widely adopted by local governments across the United States during the foreclosure crisis and facilitated the monitoring and enforcement of existing property maintenance laws. We implement a border discontinuity design combined with a triple-difference specification to overcome policy endogeneity concerns, and we find that the enactment of VPROs in Florida more than halved the negative externality from foreclosure. This finding is robust to a ...
Working Paper
The credit card debt puzzle: the role of preferences, credit risk, and financial literacy
We use the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to revisit what is termed the credit card debt puzzle: why consumers simultaneously co-hold high-interest credit card debt and low-interest assets that could be used to pay down this debt. This dataset contains unique information on intelligence, financial literacy, and preferences, while also providing a complete picture of households? balance sheets. Relative to individuals with no credit card debt but positive liquid assets, individuals in the puzzle group have higher discount rates, slightly lower financial literacy scores, and very ...
Newsletter
On the Move: Mortgage Basics
Buying a home is a major financial decision, and for young people in particular the entire process can seem overwhelming. Learn about mortgages and the steps people can take early in life to prepare themselves financially to buy a home, in this February 2022 issue of Page One Economics: Focus on Finance.