Virtually no attention has been paid to the problem of cyclicality in debates over access to mortgage credit, despite its importance as a driver of tight credit. Housing markets are prone to booms accompanied by bubbles in mortgage credit in which lenders cut underwriting standards, leading to...

House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

Governments throughout the world intervene heavily in housing markets, and most have multiple policies to pursue multiple goals. This chapter deals with two of the largest types of housing policies in the United States, namely, low-income rental assistance and policies to promote homeownership...

The 30-year fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage (or "traditional fixed-rate mortgage") was a substantial innovation when first developed during the Great Depression. However, it has three major flaws. First, because homeowner equity accumulates slowly during the first decade, homeowners are...

COVID-19 devastated the US labor market threatening homeowners’ ability to stay current on their mortgage. During the Great Recession, payment relief was more difficult to come by whereas the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provided most impacted homeowners with up...

Regression discontinuity estimates indicate that home buying is highly responsive to interest rates in a large segment of the population. A surprise 50 basis point cut in the effective interest rate for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) led to an immediate 14 percent...

This paper shows that relaxing borrowing constraints positively affects household consumption in addition to stimulating housing market activity. We focus on the UK Help-to-Buy (HTB) program, which provided a sudden relaxation of the down payment constraint by facilitating home purchases with...

Extensive structural reforms since the early 1990s have strengthened the resilience of the Swedish economy to shocks. However, more needs to be done to better manage near-term risks and ensure that growth remains sustainable in the longer run. Reforming the housing market would reduce the risks...

We show that a contraction of mortgage supply after the Great Recession has increased housing rents. Our empirical strategy exploits heterogeneity in MSAs' exposure to regulatory shocks experienced by lenders over the 2010-2014 period. Tighter lending standards have increased demand for rental...

I exploit exogenous variation in the probability that a mortgage is exposed to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac generated by property appraisals to examine how well buyers of high-priced homes balance loan size and loan cost. I find that they generally strike a proper balance despite wide variation in...