Over the course of the recent house price bubble in the United States, the price of homes rose rapidly from 1999 Q4 to 2005 Q4 (11.3% annually as measured by the Case-Shiller index, and 8.4% annually as measured by the Federal Housing Financing Agency) but slowly as measured by owner equivalent...

This paper explores the link between the house-price expectations of mortgage lenders and the extent of subprime lending. It argues that bubble conditions in the housing market are likely to spur subprime lending, with favorable price expectations easing the default concerns of lenders and thus...

We define a class of bias problems that arise when purchasers shift their expenditures among sellers charging different prices for units of precisely defined and interchangeable product items that are nevertheless regarded as different for the purposes of price measurement. For...

In this paper, we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' internal credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. Banks' private...

Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraisals are rarely below the transaction price. We exploit a unique data set to show that the mortgage application process creates an incentive to substitute the transaction price for the true...

Rapid house-price depreciation and rising unemployment were the main drivers of the huge increase in mortgage default during the downturn years of 2007 to 2010. However, mortgage default was also associated with an increased reliance on alternative mortgage products such as pay-option and...

During the housing crisis, it came to be recognized that inflated home mortgage appraisals were widespread during the subprime boom. The New York State Attorney General's office investigated this issue with respect to one particular lender and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The investigation...

We develop an experimental methodology that values “free” digital content through the lens of a production account and is consistent with the framework of the national accounts. We build upon the work in Nakamura, et al. (2016) by combining marketing- and advertising-supported content and...

The accuracy of appraisals came into scrutiny during the housing crisis, and a set of policies and regulations was adopted to address the conflict-of-interest issues in the appraisal practices. In response to an investigation by the New York State Attorney General's office, the Home Valuation...

“Free” consumer entertainment and information from the Internet, largely supported by advertising revenues, has had a major impact on consumer behavior. Some economists believe that measured gross domestic product (GDP) growth since 2000 is too low because it excludes online entertainment...