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Discussion Paper
Mortgage Rate Lock‑In and Homeowners’ Moving Plans
The U.S. housing market has had a tumultuous few years. After falling to record lows during the pandemic, the average 30-year mortgage rate rapidly increased in 2022 and 2023 and now hovers near a two-decade high of 7.2 percent. For those that locked in a low mortgage rate prior to 2022, this steep increase has significantly increased the cost of moving, as taking out a mortgage at current rates would potentially increase their monthly housing payment by hundreds or thousands of dollars, even if the amount they borrowed remained unchanged. As shown by Ferreira et al. (2011), this lock-in ...
Briefing
Mortgage Spreads and the Yield Curve
Mortgage spreads — the 30-year mortgage fixed rate minus the 10-year Treasury rate — have a history of increasing sharply in times of economic stress. While often viewed as a measure of financial stress, I argue they are mostly explained by changes in expected mortgage duration arising from changes in the yield curve. Economic stress leads to a downward-sloping yield curve, which increases expected refinance activity, shortening mortgage durations. This shorter duration makes mortgages prices reflect short (rather than long) Treasury rates. But with a downward-sloping yield curve, this ...
Journal Article
Housing Services Inflation May Decline Only Gradually
The inflation rate for housing services remains about 2 percentage points above its 2019 level. Several factors are likely to slow its decline, including more than a decade of underbuilding prior to the pandemic, limited capacity to increase the nation’s housing stock, and the limited number of homes available for sale due to the steeper mortgage rates owners would face if they sold and purchased a different home.
Working Paper
Mortgage Prepayment, Race, and Monetary Policy
This paper documents large differences in mortgage prepayment behavior across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, which have significant implications for monetary policy, inequality, and pricing. Using a novel data set that combines administrative data on mortgage performance with information on race and ethnicity, we show that Black and Hispanic white borrowers have significantly lower prepayment rates compared with Non-Hispanic white borrowers, holding income, credit score, and equity constant. This gap is on the order of 50 percent and largely reflects different sensitivities ...
Location, location, location: Mortgage rate impact varies by metro
The role of individual housing markets and their sensitivity to mortgage rate changes play an important part in understanding the impact of higher rates.
Mortgage Rates Not Matching Declines in Treasury Yields
So far this year, the spread between the 30-year mortgage rate and 10-year Treasury yield has widened. What might be causing this?
Working Paper
The Transmission of Negative Nominal Interest Rates in Finland
Despite the implementation of negative nominal interest rates by several advanced economies in the last decade and the many papers that have been written about this novel policy tool, there is still much we do not know about the effectiveness of this instrument. The pass-through of negative policy rates to loan rates is one of the main points of contention. In this paper, we analyze the pass-through of the ECB’s changes in the deposit facility rate to mortgage rates in Finland between 2005 and 2020. We use monthly data and three different empirical methodologies: correlational event ...
Report
The sensitivity of housing demand to financing conditions: evidence from a survey
The sensitivity of housing demand to mortgage rates and available leverage is key to understanding the effect of monetary and macroprudential policies on the housing market. However, since there is generally no exogenous variation in these variables that is independent of confounding factors (such as economic conditions or household characteristics), it is difficult to cleanly estimate these sensitivities empirically. We circumvent these issues by designing a strategic survey in which respondents are asked for their willingness to pay (WTP) for a home comparable to their current one, under ...
Marginal vs. Average Mortgage Rates
Mortgage rates have risen sharply, but the impact on the typical borrower can be better gauged if one considers the average rate rather than the current rate.