The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insures mortgages for low- to moderate-income homebuyers, has stated that its goal is to foster sustainable homeownership. This study proposes metrics for evaluating the degree to which the FHA has succeeded in this mission for an important program...

The U.S. mortgage finance system was one of the focal points of the 2007-08 financial crisis, yet legislative decisions about the appropriate role of the federal government in the system remain unsettled. Policy deliberations have focused on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the two enormous...

In this paper, the authors update the affordability debate using data from the 1990s. They follow Gyourko and Linneman (1993) in addressing the affordability issue by asking a simple question: Is a home of a given quality from ten or twenty years ago more or less affordable today to a household...

Between 1995 and 1998, actual growth in compensation per hour (CPH) accelerated from approximately 2 percent to 5 percent. Yet as the labor market continued to tighten in 1999, CPH growth unexpectedly slowed. This article explores whether this aggregate "wage puzzle" can be explained by changes...

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 2, " Affordability of housing for young and poor families." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The...

Interest in the relationship between household mobility and financial frictions, especially frictions associated with negative home equity, has grown following the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets. With prices falling 30 percent nationally, negative equity greatly expanded across...