We use loan-level data from the New York City metropolitan area to examine the extent to which lenders attempted to prevent foreclosures with concessionary modifications during the Great Depression. We find no principal forgiveness in the sample and only a handful of concessionary mortgage...

Young borrowers are the least experienced financially and, conventionally, thought to be most prone to financial mistakes. We study the relationship between age and financial problems related to credit cards. Our results challenge the notion that young borrowers are bad borrowers. We show that...

We investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic characteristics...

No. In this paper we use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced origination or affected prices of subprime mortgages. We use merged loan-level data on non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data for...

We quantify the effect of recourse on default and find that recourse affects default by lowering the borrower's sensitivity to negative equity. At the mean value of the default option for defaulted loans, borrowers are 30% more likely to default in non-recourse states. Furthermore, for homes...

Young borrowers are conventionally considered the most prone to making financial mistakes. This has spurred efforts to limit their access to credit, particularly via credit cards. Recent research suggests, however, that young borrowers are actually among the least likely to experience a serious...

In a recent paper, Leamer (2007) identified housing as an important precursor of the national business cycle. Previous work, on the other hand, has shown that regional cycles may not be synchronous with the aggregate cycle. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between housing and the...

I generate priors for a vector autoregression (VAR) from a standard real business cycle (RBC) model, an RBC model with capital-adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky-price model with an unaccommodating monetary authority. The response of hours worked to a TFP shock differs sharply...