Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that purchase mortgages and issue mortgage-backed securities (MBS). In addition, the GSEs are active participants in the primary and secondary mortgage markets on behalf of their own portfolios of MBS. Because these...

Since the financial crisis of 2007-2009, policymakers have debated the need for a new toolkit of cyclical "macroprudential" policies to constrain the build-up of risks in financial markets, for example, by dampening credit-fueled asset bubbles. These discussions tend to ignore America's long and...

We define a measure to be a financial vulnerability if, in a VAR framework that allows for nonlinearities, an impulse to the measure leads to an economic contraction. We evaluate alternative macrofinancial imbalances as vulnerabilities: nonfinancial sector credit, risk appetite of financial...

We present evidence that binding mortgage processing capacity constraints reduce mortgage originations to borrowers of low to modest credit quality. Mortgage processing capacity constraints typically bind when the demand for mortgage refinancing shifts outward, usually because of lower mortgage...

This paper estimates the jumbo-conforming spread using data from the Federal Housing Finance Board's Monthly Interest Rate Survey from January 1993 to June 2007. Importantly, this paper augments the typical parametric approach by adding state-level foreclosure laws and ZIP-level demographic...

Did government mortgage programs mitigate the adverse economic effects of the financial crisis? We find that counties with greater participation in traditional government mortgage programs experienced less severe economic downturns during the Great Recession. In particular, counties with higher...