The recourse-non-recourse dimension is fundamental in any loan as it deals most directly with the pool of assets out of which lender can collect at delinquency and default. This paper calls attention to an exceptional feature of the American home mortgage market, compared to mortgage markets...

The application of information technology to finance, or "fintech," is expected to revolutionize many aspects of borrowing and lending in the future, but technology has been reshaping consumer and mortgage lending for many years. During the 1990s, computerization allowed mortgage lenders to...

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...

Housing affordability is a key policy concern and an important factor in fostering sustainable homeownership. Housing costs in turn are a critical contributor to affordability. In this paper, we focus on the different components of housing costs to show the contribution of each expense to...

We exploit a timely city-level panel of individual house price estimates for both small and big real-estate markets in California USA to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on the housing market. Descriptive analysis of spot house price estimates, including contemporaneous price uncertainty and...

We exploit a panel of Zillow Inc. property valuations to estimate the excess real-estate price growth attributable to speculation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in three California regions. Our research design leverages the counterfactual comparison of price estimates for properties listed...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

This paper examines the effect of a regulatory action (the Home Valuation Code of Conduct) that was designed to reduce the incidence of inflated collateral valuations. We identify the impact of the regulation using a difference-in-difference identification strategy. Our baseline results confirm...

Prior evidence has shown appraised values of residential properties are biased, but the mechanism and motivation of appraisers to bias their estimates are unclear. We construct a database of 25.3 million comparable transactions selected and used by appraisers to estimate 6.5 million property...

With regard to the recent US house price cycle, we analyze how the interaction between housing supply restrictions, mortgage credit constraints and a price-to-price feedback loop affects house price volatility. Considering 247 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, we estimate a simultaneous boom-bust...