This paper examines racial disparities in mortgage processing time prior to the global financial crisis. We find that Black borrowers are underrepresented and experience a longer processing time than White borrowers among the mortgages securitized by government-sponsored enterprises. At the same...

We investigate the relation between large negative house price co-movements in the cross-section of US cities and the national business cycle. The occurrences of large negative house price co-movements across cities cluster over time and these clusters are closely linked to NBER recession dates....

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...

A survey of legislation from the 109th Congress pertaining to maritime security, the acquisition of US port facilities by corporations controlled by foreign governments, maintenance en route of U.S. vessels by foreign quot;riding gangsquot;, hurricane waivers of the Jones Act, the Oil Spill...

Financial innovations are a common explanation of the rise in consumer credit and bankruptcies. To evaluate this story, we develop a simple model that incorporates two key frictions: asymmetric information about borrowers' risk of default and a fixed cost to create each contract offered by...

We assess the credit market impact of allowing mortgage "strip-down" as a foreclosure-prevention measure, where strip-down reduces the principal of underwater residential mortgages to the current market value of the property for homeowners in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Our identification is provided...

This paper empirically examines business starts, deaths, venture capital and patents in relation to U.S. public policy. The most consistent evidence in the data shows that lower levels of labor frictions and higher levels of SBIR awards are associated with more business starts and higher levels...

In the past decade national law making for regulating commerce has been driven by globalization and the transplantation of foreign laws. The new Chinese Enterprise Bankruptcy Law enacted in 2006 was modeled closely on the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, especially chapter 11, which puts the bargaining...

Most research studying family financial behavior of racial/ethnic groups has ignored Asian households or arbitrarily combined them with other racial/ethnic groups. We treated Asian households as a separate racial/ethnic group to compare twelve financial behaviors and attitudes of Asian...

The social safety net for older Americans has been shrinking for the past couple decades. The risks associated with aging, reduced income, and increased healthcare costs, have been off-loaded onto older individuals. At the same time, older Americans are increasingly likely to file consumer...