Essays on the U.S. Housing Market and the Credit Market PDF Download

Author: Chuanlei Sun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Credit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Albert Zevelev
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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The US housing boom was accompanied by a rise in mortgage leverage. The subsequent bust was accompanied by a rise in foreclosure. This paper introduces a dynamic general equilibrium model to study how leverage and foreclosure affect house prices. The model shows how foreclosure sales, through their effect on housing supply, amplify and propagate house price drops. A calibration to match the bust shows consumption and housing need to be sufficiently complementary to fit the data. Since leverage plays a key role in foreclosure, a regulator can reduce systemic risk by placing a cap on leverage. Counterfactual experiments show that in a world with less leverage, the same economic shock leads to less foreclosure and less severe, shorter busts in house prices. A 90% cap on loan-to-value ratios in 2006 predicts house prices would have fallen 12% rather than 18% as in the data. The regulator faces a trade-off in that less leverage means less housing for constrained households, but also fewer foreclosures and less severe busts in house prices. A regulator with reasonable preference parameters would choose a cap of 95%.

Author: Karl E. Case
Publisher: Lincoln Inst of Land Policy
ISBN: 9781558441842
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Based on the work of Karl "Chip" Case, who is renowned for his scientific contributions to the economics of housing and public policy, this is a must read during a time of restructuring our nation's system of housing finance.

Author: Deeksha Gupta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation is motivated by the housing crisis of 2008. It consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, "Too Much Skin-in-the-Game? The Effect of Mortgage Market Concentration on Credit and House Prices," I propose a new theory to help explain the housing crisis. During the housing boom, a small number of institutions--the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and a few banks--held most of U.S. mortgage risk. I develop a theory in which such concentration of mortgage exposure can explain features of the housing crisis. I show that large lenders with many outstanding mortgages have incentives to extend risky credit to prop up house prices. An increase in concentration can lead to a boom with worsening credit quality and a subsequent bust with widespread defaults. In the second chapter, "Concentration and Lending in Mortgage Markets," joint with Ronel Elul and David Musto, we attempt to test the theory described in the first chapter. We provide evidence that concentration in mortgage markets can create perverse lending incentives. We exploit variation in the size of the GSEs' outstanding mortgage exposure across MSAs. Using a loan-level dataset, we provide evidence that the GSEs were more likely to engage in high-risk activities in areas where they had a large exposure to outstanding mortgages. We also provide evidence that this relationship is driven by an incentive to keep house prices high. In the final chapter, "Housing Booms and the Crowding-Out Effect," joint with Itay Goldstein, we study the effect that investment in real estate assets has on the economy. We develop a theory in which housing price booms can sometimes lead to a crowding-out of corporate investment. We show that an increase in real estate prices does not necessarily increase aggregate investment even when firms actively use real estate assets as collateral to borrow against and invest the proceeds in positive NPV projects. We argue that at times, it can be optimal to decrease the price of housing rather than to support high housing prices to stimulate the economy and characterize when this is the case.

Author: Michael A. Stegman
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788131311
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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A research & commentary on the critical policy issue of whether or not racial discrimination exists in the home mortgage lending industry. A collection of essays on this topic by experts such as John Yinger, Stephen Ross, & George Galster. Also includes commentaries on mortgage performance & housing market discrimination, default rates & their place in the controversy, & the role of FHA data in the lending discrimination discussion. Graphs, charts.

Author: Won Suk Chung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation is comprised of three chapters focusing on housing and credit market. The first and the third chapter analyze how a housing affects business cycle through lending constraints and mortgage contracts, while the second chapter investigates the decoupling credit markets by firms during the recession periods.The first chapter studies the business cycle asymmetry of consumption and house prices in the US. It shows that the credit shock leads to business cycle asymmetry of consumption and house prices, but the housing belief shock does not cause the business cycle asymmetry. In a New Keynesian model with a housing, the occasionally binding lending constraint leads to an asymmetric response of consumption and house prices to the credit supply shock, not the housing belief shock.The second chapter investigates the decoupling phenomenon between loans and corporate bonds markets during the recession periods. I show that by an expansionary monetary policy, a large firm increases long-term debt, but a small firm decreases long-term debt. A `cash-flow' constraint prevents the small firm from obtaining more loans via bank-lending following the expansionary Quantitative Easing (QE) or Corporate Credit Facility (CCF) policy. However, the large firm can issue more corporate bonds because it is not constrained by the 'cash-flow' constraint.The third chapter focuses on the responses of macro variables depending on mortgage designs: the fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) and the adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM). I show that the monetary policy effects in the ARM-economy is stronger than in the FRM-economy. The constraint switching effect of output and house prices in the ARM-economy in response to the monetary policy is greater than the one in the FRM-economy. The refinancing effect enhances the response of output in the FRM-economy due to rate incentive and cash-out incentive. However, the endogenous refinancing effect is smaller than the exogenous refinancing effect in the ARM-economy because the ARM-economy satisfies the rate incentive and the refinancing transaction costs are required.

Author: Min-Ho Nam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Housing
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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This thesis, motivated by my reflections about the failings of monetary policy implementation as a cause of the sub-prime crisis, attempts to answer the following inquiries: (i) whether interest rates have played a major role in generating the house price fluctuations in the U.S., (ii) what are the effects of accommodative monetary policy on the economy given banks' excessive risk-taking, and (iii) whether an optimal monetary policy rule can be found for curbing credit-driven economic volatilities in the model economy with unconventional transmission channels operating. By using a decomposition technique and regression analysis, it can be shown that short-term interest rates exert the most potent influence on the evolution of the volatile components of housing prices. One possible explanation for this is that low policy rates for a prolonged period tend to encourage bankers to take on more risk in lending. This transmission channel, labelled as the risk-taking channel, accounts for the gap to some extent between the forecast and the actual impact of monetary policy on the housing market and the overall economy. A looser monetary policy stance can also shift the preference of economic agents toward housing as theoretically and empirically corroborated in the context of choice between durable and nondurable goods. This transmission route is termed the preference channel. If these two channels are operative in the economy, policy makers need to react aggressively to rapid credit growth in order to stabilize the paths of housing prices and output. These findings provide meaningful implications for monetary policy implementation. First of all, central bankers should strive to identify in a timely fashion newly emerging and state-dependent transmission channels of monetary policy, and accurately assess the impact of policy decisions transmitted through these channels. Secondly, the intervention of central banks in the credit or housing market by adjusting policy rates can be optimal, relative to inaction, in circumstances where banks' risk-taking and the preference for housing are overly exuberant.

Author: Roberto Maria Croce
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Abstract: In the first essay of this dissertation, "Monetary Policy and the Housing Cycle," I investigate the role of monetary policy in a housing boom that precipitated the U.S. financial crisis of 2007. I find expansionary policy between 2002 and 2005 accounts for about 50% of the peak deviation of real residential investment from its long-run trend, which occurred in the second quarter of 2005. To determine if monetary policy was a contributor to the housing boom I estimate a large dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) to fit the economy in several different time periods. I mathematically isolate a series of changes in the Fed Funds rate that are statistically unrelated to changes in the macroeconomy and classify these deviations as a measure of monetary policy. The magnitude of the monetary policy series is relatively small during the housing boom but explains half of the of the 2005 peak in residential investment because of inertia in the Fed Funds rate.

Author: Bulent Guler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Housing
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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In the first chapter, I study the effects of innovations in information technology on the housing market. Specifically, I focus on the improved ability of lenders to assess the credit risk of home buyers, which has become possible with the emergence of automated underwriting systems in the United States in the mid-1990s. I develop a standard life-cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic income uncertainty. I explicitly model the housing tenure choice of the households: rent/purchase decision for renters and stay/sell/default decision for homeowners. Risk-free lenders offer mortgage contracts to prospective home buyers and the terms of these contracts depend on the observable characteristics of households. Households are born as either good credit risk types--having a high time discount factor--or bad types--having a low time discount factor. The type of the household is the only source of asymmetric information between households and lenders. I find that as lenders have better information about the type of households, the average down payment fraction decreases together with an increase in the average mortgage premium, the foreclosure rate, and the dispersions of mortgage interest rates and down payment fractions, which are consistent with the trends in the housing market in the last 15 years. From a welfare perspective, I find that better information, on average, makes households better off. In the second chapter, I focus on the labor market behavior of couples. Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their partners--in couples and families--and decisions are made jointly. This chapter studies, from a theoretical viewpoint, the joint job-search and location problem of a household formed by a couple (e.g., husband and wife) who perfectly pool income. The objective of the exercise, very much in the spirit of standard search theory, is to characterize the reservation wage behavior of the couple and compare it to the single-agent search model in order to understand the ramifications of partnerships for individual labor market outcomes and wage dynamics. We focus on two main cases. First, when couples are risk averse and pool income, joint-search yields new opportunities--similar to on-the job search--relative to the single-agent search. Second, when couples face offers from multiple locations and a cost of living apart, joint-search features new frictions and can lead to significantly worse outcomes than single-agent search. Finally, in the third chapter, I focus on the relation between house prices and interest rates. Although interest rates and housing prices seem mostly to have a negative relation in the data, the relation does not seem to be stable. For example, the recent run up in the global housing prices is generally explained by globally low interest rates. On the other hand, there have been periods where housing prices and interest rates moved together. Motivated by these observations, I formulate a two period OLG model to find out the form of the relationship between interest rates and housing prices. It appears that the distribution of homeownership is also important for housing price dynamics. I show that housing prices in the equilibrium do not always have a negative relation with interest rates.

Author: Chen Zheng
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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This dissertation studies different aspects of the U.S. mortgage market, an important sector of the entire economy. The first chapter focus on the refinance market for residential mortgage, while the second and third chapter explores the previously overlooked non-agency mortgage servicing industry. The first chapter (joint with Xiaoye Tian) studies the unintended consequences arising from program design, and how it augments the market power of incumbent lenders, in the context of a federal program called Home Affordable Refinance Program. We build a dynamic discrete choice model of refinance decision where the payoff is generated from a search and negotiation process. We estimate the model using data on program participation and pricing decision. The estimation exploits a significant change to the program design that gives exogenous variation in the competitive advantage of incumbent lenders under the program. In a counterfactual where the advantage granted by program design is shut down, we find that it leads to an average welfare improvement of $4,977. The insight from this study could apply to other policies whose implementation depends on intermediaries with incumbency advantage with respect to targeted agents. The second chapter (joint with Moussa Diop) explores incentive issues associated with the servicer compensation structure in non-agency securitizations. First, we document key stylized facts on servicing fees. We show that they decrease with loan quality, loan amount, and loan maturity; suggest economies of scale in servicing; increase with the intensity of default in outstanding deals; and are lower on issuer-serviced loans. As a key contribution of this study, we show that servicing fees play a significant role in mortgage modification and foreclosure as servicers protect their cash flows, possibly to the detriment of security investors, by keeping alive loans paying high fees. As the government retrenches from housing finance, leaving room for private lending and securitization, this incentive problem in servicing will become a pressing issue for regulators to address. In the third chapter (joint with Moussa Diop), we examine the informativeness of servicing fees about the quality of non-agency mortgage collateral pools and, ultimately, the value of the mortgage-backed securities. We find that servicing fees capture unobservable credit risk that explains mortgage default and differentially affects the performance of various security classes. However, security yields at issuance appropriately reflect for this risk, which suggests that investors were more sophisticated than previously thought or that deal issuers were more transparent about collateral credit risk than recognized in the literature. The slow reemergence of non-prime lending as non-qualified mortgages makes the findings of this study still relevant.