The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has stated that its goal is to foster sustainable homeownership. In this paper, we propose some metrics for evaluating the degree to which the FHA is attaining this goal for first-time homebuyers. This work uses New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel data to...

Over the last thirty years, there have been significant changes in several empirical measures of local labor market monopsony power. A monopsonist has a profit incentive to offer lower wages to local workers. High skilled mobile workers can avoid these lower wages by moving to other more...

Following Manzan (2021), this paper examines how professional forecasters revise their uncertainty (variance) forecasts. We show that popular first moment "efficiency" tests are not applicable to study variance forecasts and instead employ monotonicity tests developed by Patton and Timmermann...

This paper examines point and density forecasts from the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters. We derive individual uncertainty measures along with individual point- and density-based measures of disagreement. We also explore the relationship between uncertainty and...

We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that...

This chapter considers the structure of mortgage finance in the U.S., and its role in shaping patterns of homeownership, the nature of the housing stock, and the organization of residential activity. We start by providing some background on the design features of mortgage contracts that...

We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that...

We explore the capital structure and governance of a mortgage-insuring securitization utility operating with government reinsurance for systemic or 'tail' risk. The structure we propose for the replacement of the GSEs focuses on aligning incentives for appropriate pricing and transfer of...

We use matched point and density forecasts of output growth and inflation from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters to derive measures of forecast uncertainty, forecast dispersion, and forecast accuracy. We construct uncertainty measures from aggregate density functions as well as from...

Housing is a depreciating asset. The rate of depreciation depends on the degree to which households engage in housing investments. Housing investment expenditures economy-wide are sizable, averaging 45 percent of the value of new home construction over the past twenty years. The housing bust and...