Student debt payments represent a barrier to homeownership because student loan debt increases the difficulty in qualifying for a mortgage and it decreases the amount of income available to afford a mortgage. Yet student loans are different from other types of debt such as auto and credit card...

To our knowledge, this paper is the first to describe the pathways through which same-sex marriage laws are thought to increase same-sex mortgage applications. The paper is also the first to use the HMDA dataset to examine the pattern of same-sex mortgage applications over time and exploit state...

We examine an untested hypothesis that posits that null results in early studies examining the economic impacts of smoking bans were driven by sample selection. Early adopters could better absorb the shock of bans, but among worse selected late adopters bans would adversely impact bars and...

This paper investigates the impact of property tax delinquency on the sales price of nearby residential properties, an effect that we call the “delinquency discount”. Using a unique data set from Chicago, we control for the duration of delinquency as well as the potential simultaneous...

Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) loans experience high rates of property tax default (IFE, 2016; CFPB, 2012). Given tax burden is predictive of default (Moulton, et. al., 2015), it is important for HECM participants to take advantage of available property tax relief programs. To examine...

Using the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS 2002), a unique survey that tracks High School sophomores to young adulthood, we estimate the relationship between student loan debt, educational attainment, and tenure choice. We improve upon prior studies by matching pre-treatment...