The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

Explains how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the economics and politics of the housing boom and bust. The "creative" financing of home mortgages and "creative" marketing of financial securities based on these mortgages to countries around the world, are part of...

"We demonstrate that a rapid expansion in the supply of mortgages driven by disintermediation explains a large fraction of recent U.S. house price appreciation and subsequent mortgage defaults. We identify the effect of shifts in the supply of mortgage credit by exploiting within-county...