Since the collapse of the U.S. financial markets in 2008, Congress and the policy community have been engaged in a broad-based discussion about the housing market reform, including making significant changes to the operations of government sponsored entities (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae, Freddie...

In Asia, government-supported housing agencies have played a constructive role in the development of domestic residential mortgage and bond markets. Several agencies have increased their overall market presence in recent years by expanding their activities and have accepted a larger share of the...

This paper presents an analysis of the distribution of home purchase mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in the primary mortgage market. Utilizing a sample of loan originations aggregated at the zip code level, the distribution of the market served by FHA and...

This study investigates whether mortgage financing regulation unintentionally leads to minorities paying a higher loan contract rate under a risk-based pricing system. We provide evidence that minority borrowers prepay less frequently than comparable non-minority borrowers and thus have lower...

Rural homeownership is promoted in the United States by mortgage insurance programs administered by the federal government. We analyze the choice between assistance offered by two such agencies: the Federal Housing Administration and the Rural Housing Service. We find applicants are sensitive to...

We show that a contraction of mortgage supply after the Great Recession has increased housing rents. Our empirical strategy exploits heterogeneity in MSAs' exposure to regulatory shocks experienced by lenders over the 2010-2014 period. Tighter lending standards have increased demand for rental...

Like the United States, Denmark relies heavily on capital markets for funding residential mortgages, and its covered bond market bears a number of similarities to U.S. agency securitization. This article describes the key features of the Danish mortgage finance system and compares and contrasts...

In this paper, we revisit the design of interest free house finance. First, we discuss the current practice in conventional banking and Islamic banking. Then, we discuss an alternate design for interest free house finance. The proposal we present attempts to analyze the implication of using...

This paper studies mortgage contract choices in US history using a first-of-its-kind sample of residential loans from 1930 and 1940, linked to the decennial censuses. Contract choices reflected borrowers' reactions to the risks posed by different contracts. The majority of borrowers chose...

In the wake of the stalled Johnson-Crapo bill, the overarching goal of housing finance reform continues to be the efficient provision of long-term fixed-rate mortgages to credit-worthy borrowers in all markets throughout the business cycle. This Issue Brief analyzes three newly-proposed plans...