Mortgage Credit Availability, Housing Starts and the Integration of Mortgage and Capital Markets: New Evidence Using Linear Feedback

This paper employs linear feedback measures to examine the relationship between housing starts and the availability of mortgage credit. Estimates are obtained using monthly data with samples ending with May 1978 and beginning with June 1978. The results indicate that mortgage credit availability contributed significantly to short-run cycles in housing starts in the earlier sample. Such feedback is considerably smaller, however, in the later sample. The results suggest the housing finance sector has become integrated with the overall capital market as the result of the deregulation of thrift deposit rates and the development of the securitized mortgage market. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.