Working Paper
Immigration and the neighborhood
Wachter, Susan M.; Saiz, Albert (2006)
What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, the authors find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. They propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive (native flight). To instrument for the actual number of new immigrants, the authors deploy a geographic diffusion model that predicts the number of new immigrants in a neighborhood using lagged densities of the foreign-born ...
Working Papers , Paper 06-22

Journal Article
Credit risk transfer, informed markets, and securitization
Wachter, Susan M. (2018-24-03)
Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) funded the U.S. housing bubble, while the ensuing bust resulted in systemic risk and the global financial crisis of 2007-09. In the run-up to the crisis, MBS pricing failed to reveal the growing credit risk. This article draws lessons from this failure that could inform the use of credit risk transfers (CRTs) to price credit risk. The author concludes that the CRT market, as currently constituted, could have appropriately priced and revealed credit risk during the bubble years because it met three key requirements: 1) transparency, through the full provision ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue 24-3 , Pages 117-137

Conference Paper
Borrower and neighborhood racial and income characteristics and financial institution mortgage application screening
Wachter, Susan M.; Schill, Michael H. (1994)
Proceedings

Journal Article
Green investment strategies: a positive force in cities
Wachter, Susan M.; Gillen, Kevin C.; Brown, Carolyn R. (2008-04)
Deterioration of urban neighborhoods is known to induce out migration, but how well do public investments to reverse decline actually work? To evaluate Philadelphia?s greening investment, researchers measured property buyers? willingness to pay more?and found that greening works.
Communities and Banking , Issue Spr , Pages 24-27

Conference Paper
Subprime lending: neighborhood patterns over time
Russo, Karl; Hershaff, Jonathan; Wachter, Susan M. (2005)
Proceedings , Paper 954

Journal Article
Commentary
Wachter, Susan M. (2003-06)
This paper was presented at the conference "Policies to Promote Affordable Housing," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, February 7, 2002. It was part of Session 4: Housing Subsidies and Finance, and is a commentary on "Comparing the costs of federal housing assistance programs" by Denise DiPasquale, Dennis Fricke and Daniel Garcia-Diaz.
Economic Policy Review , Issue Jun , Pages 167-168

Working Paper
First-Time Homebuyers: Toward a New Measure
Calem, Paul S.; Jagtiani, Julapa; Wachter, Susan M.; Acolin, Arthur (2017-10-09)
Existing data sources show divergent estimates of the number of homes purchased by first-time homebuyers as a share of all home purchases. In this paper, we use a new data set to construct a time series of the share of first-time homebuyers. This series, based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Equifax Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), shows a significant decline in this share, particularly for young households, which is consistent with the decline in homeownership in this age cohort since the early 2000s.
Working Papers , Paper 17-36

Conference Paper
The housing finance revolution
Wachter, Susan M.; Green, Richard K. (2007)
Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole