The authors construct a quantitative equilibrium model of the housing sector that accounts for the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate, and the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners prior to the recent boom and bust in the housing market. They analyze the key...

This paper presents 12 facts about the mortgage market. The authors argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from financial industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. Instead, they argue that borrowers and investors made decisions that...

Since the start of the financial crisis of 2007-09, a historically large number of household loans have become delinquent and residential houses have been foreclosed. This situation, coupled with households actively paying down their debt or cutting down on new borrowing, marked the beginning of...

In the current climate, the mission of HOPI takes on a much higher level of urgency. The graph in Exhibit 1 depicts the sharp increase in foreclosure starts1 city-wide in the past two years in particular. Foreclosure starts in Chicago rose approximately 40 percent from 2006 to 2007; and...

The housing bust leaves in its wake elevated foreclosure levels in Texas and the U.S. Like other consequences of the bust, including declines in construction and existing-home sales, foreclosures have been less severe in Texas. While the nation's foreclosure rate has grown nearly sixfold over...

In this note we discuss the findings in Piskorski, Seru, and Vig (2010), as well as the authors' interpretation of their results. First, we find that small changes to the set of covariates used by PSV significantly reduce the magnitude of the differences in foreclosure rates between securitized...

On December 9–10, 2009, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hosted a conference on mortgage foreclosure policy with the help of the Chicago Community Trust, Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Woodstock Institute.

This paper argues that the U.S. bankruptcy reform of 2005 played an important role in the mortgage crisis and the current recession. When debtors file for bankruptcy, credit card debt and other types of debt are discharged - thus loosening debtors' budget constraints. Homeowners in financial...