Borrowers terminate residential mortgages for a variety of reasons. Prepayments and defaults have always been distinguishable, and researchers have recently distinguished between prepayments involving a move and other prepayments. But these categories still combine distinct decisions. For...

We study the house price recovery in the U.S. single-family residential housing market since the outbreak of the mortgage crisis, which, in contrast to the preceding housing boom, was not accompanied by a rise in homeownership rates. Using comprehensive property-level transaction data, we show...

Retired homeowners dissave more slowly than renters, which suggests that homeownership affects retirees' saving decisions. We investigate empirically and theoretically the life-cycle patterns of homeownership, housing and nonhousing assets in retirement. Using an estimated structural model of...

This study provides new evidence on the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on mortgage lending by taking advantage of an exogenous policy shock in 2014, which caused significant changes in neighborhoods' CRA eligibility in the Philadelphia market. The loss of CRA coverage leads to an...

This paper examines changes in the redefault rate of mortgages that were selected for modification during 2008-2011, compared with that of similarly situated self-cured mortgages. We find a large decline in the redefault rate of both modified and self-cured mortgages over this period, but the...

Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraised values are rarely below the purchase contract price: Some 30% of appraisals in our sample are exactly at the home price (with less than 10% of them below it). We lay out a basic theoretical...

Ten years after the mortgage crisis, the U.S. housing market has rebounded significantly with house prices now near the peak achieved during the boom. Homeownership rates, on the other hand, have continued to decline. We reconcile the two phenomena by documenting the rising presence of...

We investigate the effect of declining house prices on household consumption behavior during 2006-2009. We use an individual-level dataset that has detailed information on borrower characteristics, mortgages and credit risk. Proxying consumption by individual-level auto loan originations, we...

The authors construct a quantitative equilibrium model of the housing market in which an unanticipated increase in the supply of housing triggers default mortgages via its effect on house prices. The decline in house prices creates an incentive to increase the consumption of housing space, but...

The academic literature, the popular press, and policymakers have all debated securitization's contribution to the poor performance of mortgages originated in the run-up to the recent crisis. Theoretical arguments have been advanced on both sides, but the lack of suitable data has made it...