We examine the determinants of congressional voting behavior on two of the most significant pieces of federal legislation in U.S. economic history: the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. We find evidence that...

The turmoil that started with increased defaults in the subprime mortgage market has generated instability in the financial system around the world. To better understand the root causes of this financial instability, we quantify the relative importance of various drivers behind subprime...

This paper develops a control-function methodology accounting for endogenous or mismeasured regressors in hazard models. I provide sufficient identifying assumptions and regularity conditions for the estimator to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Applying my estimator to the subprime...

Contents; Preface; Postmortem for a Housing Crash / Edward L. Glaeser and Todd Sinai; 1. House Price Moments in Boom-Bust Cycles / Todd Sinai; 2. The Supply Side of the Housing Boom and Bust of the 2000s / Andrew Haughwout, Richard W. Peach, John Sporn, and Joseph Tracy; 3. A Spatial Look at Housing...

We provide new, time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles to instrument for house prices. Our main findings are that: 1) Large housing wealth effects are not new: we estimate...

We analyze whether mid-level managers in securitized finance were aware of the housing bubble and a looming crisis in 2004-2006 using their personal home transaction data. To the extent that the practice of securitization may have led to lax screening of subprime borrowers, we find that the...

The increase in defaults in the subprime mortgage market is widely held to be one of the causes behind the recent financial turmoil. Key issues of policy concern include quantifying the role of various factors, such as home price declines and loosened underwriting standards, in the recent...

Utilizing new panel micro data on the ownership sequences of all types of borrowers from 1997-2012 leads to a reinterpretation of the U.S. foreclosure crisis as more of a prime, rather than a subprime, borrower issue. Moreover, traditional mortgage default factors associated with the economic...

Most evidence on foreclosure spillovers identifies localized effects that are modest in magnitude, but these effects could multiply to larger aggregate effects across broad neighborhoods. We test this proposition developing a proxy for the fraction of mortgages in negative equity during the...