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Working Paper
Does getting a mortgage affect credit card use?
Buying a house changes a household?s balance sheet by simultaneously reducing liquidity and introducing mortgage payments, which may leave the household more exposed to other shocks. We find that this change affects credit card use in two ways: A debt effect increases credit card spending, while a credit effect leads to higher credit limits. In the short run, a new mortgage acquisition has a robust and statistically significant positive effect on credit card utilization ? the fraction of a consumer?s credit card limit that is used ? of approximately 11 percentage points. Before the 2008 ...
Discussion Paper
How COVID-19 Affected First-Time Homebuyers
Efforts in the spring of 2020 to contain the spread of COVID-19 resulted in a sharp contraction in U.S. economic growth and an unprecedented, rapid rise in unemployment. While the first wave of the pandemic slowed the spring housing market, home sales rebounded sharply over the rest of the year, with strong gains in house prices. Given the rising house prices and continuing high unemployment, concerns arose that COVID-19 may have negatively affected first-time homebuyers. Using a new and more accurate measure of first-time homebuyers, we find that these buyers have not been adversely affected ...
Discussion Paper
The Role of Educational Attainment in Household Debt and Delinquency Disparities
This post concludes a three-part series exploring the gender, racial, and educational disparities of debt outcomes of college students. In the previous two posts, we examined how debt holding and delinquency behaviors vary among students of different race and gender, breaking up our analyses by level of degree pursued by the student. We found that Black and Hispanic students were less likely than white students to take on credit card debt, auto loans, and mortgage debt, but experienced higher rates of delinquency in each of these debt areas by the age of 30. In contrast, Black students were ...
Working Paper
FinTech Lending, Social Networks and the Transmission of Monetary Policy
One of the main channels through which monetary policy stimulus affects the real economy is mortgage borrowing. This channel, however, is weakened by frictions in the mortgage market. The rapid growth of financial technology-based (FinTech) lending tends to ease these frictions, given the higher quality services provided under this new lending model. This paper establishes that the role of FinTech lending in the monetary policy transmission is further amplified by consumers’ social networks. I provide empirical evidence for this network effect using county-level data and novel ...
Working Paper
Housing Wealth and Consumption: The Role of Heterogeneous Credit Constraints
We quantify the role of heterogeneity in households’ financial constraints in explaining the large decline in consumption between 2006 and 2009. Using household-level data, we show that in addition to a direct effect of changes in house prices, there are sizable indirect effects from general equilibrium feedback and bank health. About 60% of the aggregate response of consumption to changes in house prices is explained by ex-ante and ex-post financial constraints, where only a specific set of households face binding ex-post financial constraints as a result of declining house prices. We find ...
Report
Credit risk transfer and de facto GSE reform
We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?s credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the exposure of the federal government to mortgage credit risk without disrupting the liquidity or stability of mortgage secondary markets. In the process, the programs have created a new financial market for pricing and trading mortgage credit risk, which has grown in size and liquidity over time. The CRT ...
Report
Intermediation Frictions in Debt Relief: Evidence from CARES Act Forbearance
We study how intermediaries—mortgage servicers—shaped the implementation of mortgage forbearance during the COVID-19 pandemic and use servicer-level variation to trace out the causal effect of forbearance on borrowers. Forbearance provision varied widely across servicers. Small servicers and nonbanks, especially nonbanks with small liquidity buffers, facilitated fewer forbearances and saw a higher incidence of forbearance-related complaints. Easier access to forbearance substantially increased mortgage nonpayment but also reduced delinquencies outside of forbearance. Part of the liquidity ...
Working Paper
An agency problem in the MBS market and the solicited refinancing channel of large-scale asset purchases
In this paper, we document that mortgage-backed securities (MBS) held by the Federal Reserve exhibit faster principal prepayment rates than MBS held by the rest of the market. Next, we show that this stylized fact persists even when controlling for factors that affect prepayment behavior, and thus determine the MBS that are delivered to the Federal Reserve. After ruling out several potential explanations for this result, we provide evidence that points to an agency problem in the secondary market for MBS, which has not previously been documented, as the most likely explanation for the ...
Working Paper
Can Everyone Tap Into the Housing Piggy Bank? Racial Disparities in Access to Home Equity
An oft-touted benefit of homeownership is the ability to build and access equity, and in recent years the amount of “tappable” home equity held by US homeowners has reached historic levels. But more than one-quarter of recent applications for mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW) loan products were denied. Black and Hispanic homeowners’ applications were denied at even higher rates: 44 percent and 32 percent, respectively. These racial disparities in denials are larger than those associated with purchase and rate/term refinance mortgage applications. Controlling for loan and borrower ...
Discussion Paper
Who’s on First? Characteristics of First-Time Homebuyers
In our previous post, we presented a new measure of first-time homebuyers. In this post, we use this improved measure to describe the characteristics of first-time buyers and how those characteristics change over time. Having an accurate assessment of first-time buyers is important given that the aim of many housing policies is to support the transition from renting to owning. A proper assessment of these housing policies requires an understanding of the impact of these policies on the share of first-time buyers and the characteristics of these buyers. Our third post will directly examine ...