Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 13.
(refine search)
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
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 ...
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
Monetary Policy and Homeownership: Empirical Evidence,Theory, and Policy Implications
We show that monetary policy affects homeownership decisions and argue that this effect is an important and overlooked channel of monetary policy transmission. We first document that monetary policy shocks are a substantial driver of fluctuations in the U.S. homeownership rate and that monetary policy affects households' housing tenure choices. We then develop and calibrate a two-agent New Keynesian model that can replicate the estimated transmission of monetary policy shocks to homeownership rates and housing rents. We find that the calibrated model provides an explanation to the "price ...
Working Paper
A Day Late and a Dollar Short : Liquidity and Household Formation among Student Borrowers
The federal government encourages human capital investment through lending and grant programs, but resources from these programs may also finance non-education activities for students whose liquidity is otherwise restricted. This paper explores this possibility, using administrative data for the universe of federal student loan borrowers linked to tax records. We examine the effects of a sharp discontinuity in program limits?generated by the timing of a student borrower?s 24th birthday?on household formation early in the lifecycle. After demonstrating that this discontinuity induces a jump in ...
Working Paper
Improving the 30-Year Fixed-Rate Mortgage
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 so little 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 homeowner might have better uses for this ...
Working Paper
Institutional Investors and the U.S. Housing Recovery
We study the house price recovery in the U.S. single-family residential housing market since the outbreak of the mortgage crisis, which, in contrast to the preceding housing boom, was not accompanied by a rise in homeownership rates. Using comprehensive property-level transaction data, we show that this phenomenon is largely explained by the emergence of institutional investors. By exploiting heterogeneity in a county?s exposure to local lending conditions and to government programs that a?ected investors? access to residential properties, we estimate that the increasing presence of ...
Discussion Paper
Small-Dollar Mortgages for Single-Family Residential Properties
There is a significant lack of financing available for low-cost homes, which many first-time homebuyers and low- and middle-income families rely on to move from renting to homeownership. This brief examines the availability of small-dollar mortgages (up to $70,000) for home purchases, refinances, and improvements, presenting a wealth of information on borrower and loan characteristics, production channels, and the geographic distribution of low-cost homes. We find that there is limited mortgage availability for the small loans needed to support the significant number of low-cost property ...
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 ...
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.