Approximately 30% of housing defaults are strategic: the homeowner is able to make the payments but rationally chooses not to do so due to negative equity. This document describes the Responsible Homeowner Reward (“RH Reward”), an incentive plan to deter strategic defaults by increasing the...

The U.S. residential housing market collapse illustrates the consequences of ignoring risk while funding mortgage borrowing. Collateral over-valuation was a foundational piece of the crisis. Over the past few decades, secondary markets, securitization, policy and psychology increased the flow of...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between parental labor supply, children's cognitive development and intra-household bargaining power. To do so, I construct a model that incorporates preference heterogeneity across and within households, a constrained cooperative bargaining framework...

Regulation is especially important for infrastructure systems (such as wind energy), which are characterised by a triple regulation challenge in the areas of R&D spillovers, environmental protection, and access to monopolistic bottlenecks. A heterodox approach is used to study the effects of...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...

An expansion in mortgage credit to subprime borrowers is widely believed to have been a principal driver of the 2002–2006 U.S. house price boom. By contrast, this paper documents a robust, negative correlation between the growth in the share of purchase mortgages to subprime borrowers and...

Most Americans have not heard of 'Do Not Track,' a proposal to allow Internet users to exercise more control over online advertising. However, when probed, most prefer that Do Not Track block advertisers from collecting data about their online activities. This is a much more privacy-protective...

We show that changes in choice architecture have a large effect on student loan decisions while we do not find significant effects of sizeable interest rate changes. We evaluate the effect of two polices implemented in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education: (1) the requirement that all...