This article presents findings from the HMDA data through 2016. The number of mortgage originations in 2016 rose 13 percent from 2015. Black and Hispanic white borrowers increased their share of home-purchase loans for the third straight year. The share of mortgages originated by nondepository,...

Housing demand stimulus produces a multiplier effect by freeing up owners attempting to sell their current home, allowing them to re-enter the market as buyers and triggering a chain of further transactions. Exploiting a shock to first-time home buyer demand caused by the 2015 surprise cut in...

This article documents patterns in residential mortgage lending through 2014 along a number of dimensions using data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. After describing high level trends in mortgage lending by race, ethnicity and income through 2014, the article examines: (1) The...

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 article provides an overview of the 2013 data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA) and documents mortgage market activity over time as well as lending patterns across different demographic groups and lender types. In addition, we use a unique data set composed of...

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages banks to lend to low and moderate income individuals. Following the subprime crisis, the CRA was accused of having promoted risky lending. This paper estimates the effect of the CRA on mortgage lending, exploiting variation in the set of banks...

We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the...

This paper estimates the effect of home ownership on individuals' unemployment. Because of higher moving costs, home owners will be less willing than renters to re- locate for work and could therefore face longer unemployment spells. Estimation is complicated by the endogeneity of ownership, as...