We construct a new measure of mortgage credit availability that describes the maximum amount obtainable by a borrower of given characteristics. We estimate this "loan frontier" using mortgage originations data from 2001 to 2014 and show that it reflects a binding borrowing constraint. Our...

The Credit Card Accountability and Disclosure Act (CARD Act) of 2009 restricted several risk management practices of credit card issuers. Using a quasi-experimental design with credit bureau data on consumer lending, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the act's restrictions on...

As the U.S. emerges from the Great Recession, there is concern about slowing rates of new household formation and declining interest in homeownership, especially among younger households. Potential reasons that have been posited include tight mortgage credit and housing supply, changing...

I pool data from all large multimarket lenders in the U.S. to estimate how many of the over seven million jobs lost in the Great Recession can be explained by reductions in the supply of mortgage credit. I construct a mortgage credit supply instrument at the county level, the weighted average...

Recently, there has been significant interest in the high levels of rental cost burden being experienced across the United States. Much of this scholarship has focused on rental cost burdens in larger urban areas, or at the national level, and has not explored differences in the prevalence of...

We estimate a neighborhood choice model using 2014 American Community Survey data to investigate the degree to which new housing supply can improve housing affordability. In the model, equilibrium rental rates are determined so that the number of households choosing each neighborhood is equal to...

The U.S. government guarantees a majority of residential mortgages, which is often justified as a means to promote homeownership. In this paper we use property-level data to estimate the effect of government mortgage guarantees on homeownership, by exploiting variation of the conforming loan...