Supersedes Working Paper 13-27. Reverse mortgage loans (RMLs) allow older homeowners to borrow against housing wealth without moving. Despite growth in this market, only 2.1% of eligible homeowners had RMLs in 2011. In this paper, the authors analyze reverse mortgages in a calibrated life-cycle...

During the housing crisis, it came to be recognized that inflated home mortgage appraisals were widespread during the subprime boom. The New York State Attorney General’s office investigated this issue with respect to one particular lender and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The investigation...

Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraisals are rarely below the transaction price. We exploit a unique data set to show that the mortgage application process creates an incentive to substitute the transaction price for the true...

Since the start of the financial crisis, we have seen an extraordinary lengthening of foreclosure timelines, particularly in states that require judicial review to complete a foreclosure but also recently in nonjudicial states. Our analysis synthesizes findings from several lines of research,...