Brazil has largely accomplished its urban transition but housing conditions for many residents of its urban centers remain such that they have large negative effects on individual and social welfare. This report develops a comprehensive measure of housing adequacy based on seven different...

This paper develops a novel measure of affordability for the Sao Paulo metropolitan region that combines housing costs and transportation costs, including opportunity cost associated with commuting time. We also contribute to existing measures of housing affordability in Brazil by imputing...

This paper presents summary statistics and a preliminary analysis of the success rate of loan modifications made in 2010 and January 2011 to residential mortgages securitized in private-label residential mortgage-backed securities. We find that these more recent private-label loan modifications...

This paper discusses findings relative to the impact of borrowing constraints on homeownership in the U.S. in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. While homeownership declines and tightened credit are evident, the role the tightening of credit has had on the probability of individual...

This article performs an exercise in which we identify the potential impact of key drivers of home ownership rates on home ownership outcomes by 2050. We take no position on whether these key determinants in fact will come about. Rather we perform an exercise in which we test for their impact....

Existing data sources show divergent estimates of the number of homes purchased by first-time homebuyers as a share of all home purchases. In this paper, we use a new data set to construct a time series of the share of first-time homebuyers. This series, based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New...

In the midst of urban policy institutions taking greater advantage of technological advances for generating data, this paper analyzes the current state of using satellite imagery to monitor informal settlement patterns. Using the issue of informal settlements in rapid urbanization, this paper...

We examine the factors that determine the likelihood of borrowers using non-traditional mortgages (NTMs) prior to the Great Recession. Borrower choice depends on borrower characteristics such as income, levels of asset holdings, credit score and age and on market factors such as house price...