Despite the recent flood of foreclosures on residential mortgages, little is known about what happens to borrowers and their households after their mortgage has been foreclosed. We study the post-foreclosure experience of U.S. households using a unique dataset based on the credit reports of a...

This paper examines the effects of seller uncertainty over their home value on the housing market. Using evidence from a new dataset on home listings and transactions, I first show that sellers do not have full information about current period demand conditions for their homes. I incorporate...

The relationship between the mortgage interest rate and a household's demand for mortgage debt has important implications for a host of public policy questions. In this paper, we use detailed data on over 2.7 million mortgages to provide novel estimates of the interest rate elasticity of...

Using granular data on home builder housing developments from the 2006-09 housing crisis, I show that builders spread house price shocks across geographically distinct projects via their internal capital markets. Builders who experience losses in one area subsequently sell homes in unaffected...

The 30-year fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage (or "traditional fixed-rate mortgage") was a substantial innovation when first developed during the Great Depression. However, it has three major flaws. First, because homeowner equity accumulates slowly during the first decade, homeowners are...

We assess racial discrimination in mortgage approvals using new data on mortgage applications. Minority applicants tend to have significantly lower credit scores, higher leverage, and are less likely than white applicants to receive algorithmic approval from race-blind government automated...

We investigate the impact of Great Recession policies in California that substantially increased lender pecuniary and time costs of foreclosure. We estimate that the California Foreclosure Prevention Laws (CFPLs) prevented 250,000 California foreclosures (a 20% reduction) and created $300...

This paper explores the relationship between the health of the financial sector and the rest of the economy. We develop an indicator of financial sector health using a distance-to-default measure based on a Merton-style option pricing model. Our measure spans over three decades and appears to...

This paper examines the relationship between money market fund (MMF) risks and outcomes during crises, with a focus on the ABCP crisis in 2007 and the run on money funds in 2008. I analyze three broad types of MMF risks: portfolio risks arising from a fund's assets, investor risk reflecting the...

Which of the strategies for financing constraints in economic models is the most empirically plausible? This paper tests two commonly used models of financing constraints, costly state verification (Townsend, 1979) and moral hazard (Holmström and Tirole, 1997), using a comprehensive data set of...