This paper documents the role of the collateral lending channel to facilitate small business starts and self-employment in the period before the financial crisis of 2008. We document that between 2002 and 2007 areas with a bigger run up in house prices experienced a strong increase in employment...

This paper documents a number of key facts about the evolution of mortgage debt, homeownership, debt burden and subsequent delinquency during the recent housing boom and Great Recession. We show that the mortgage expansion was shared across the entire income distribution, i.e. the flow and stock...

Ten years after the financial crisis of 2008, there is widespread agreement that the boom in mortgage lending and its subsequent reversal were at the core of the Great Recession. We survey the existing evidence, which suggests that inflated house-price expectations across the economy played a...

We develop a new instrument to analyze how exogenous changes in mortgage rates affect house values. Our instrument combines annual changes in the conforming loan limit (CLL) with the 80% loan-to-value threshold, which is commonly used in the approval of conforming loans. Houses that become...

This paper addresses two critiques by Mian and Sufi (2015a, 2015b) that were released in response to the results documented in Adelino, Schoar and Severino (2015). We confirm that none of the results in our previous paper are affected by the issues put forward in these critiques; in particular...