Regional Redistribution Through the U.S. Mortgage Market

An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which households can use borrowing to smooth location-specific risks depends crucially on the interest rate and how it varies with local economic conditions. In the U.S., the bulk of borrowing occurs through the mortgage market and is heavily influenced by the presence of government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). We empirically establish that despite large spatial variation in predictable default risk, there is essentially no spatial variation in GSE mortgage rates, conditional on borrower observables. In contrast, we show that the private market does set interest rates based in part on regional risk factors and postulate that the lack of regional variation in GSE mortgage rates is likely driven by political pressure. We quantify the economic impact of the national interest rate policy on regional risk by building a structural spatial model of collateralized borrowing to match various features from our empirical analysis. The model suggests that the national interest rate policy has significant ex-post redistributional consequences across regions.