Following the 2008 financial crisis, Congress required residential mortgage lenders to make a reasonable determination of borrowers' ability to repay before extending credit. Most regard this ability-to-repay rule as a consumer protection provision. But what is less well appreciated is the...

Mortgage backed securities (MBS) funded the US housing bubble, while the bust resulted in systemic risk and the Global Financial Crisis. The pricing of MBS and the ABX securitization index failed to reveal growing credit risk. This paper draws lessons from this failure for the use of Credit Risk...

Shelter is a necessity of life and the building block of cities. Cities cannot be inclusive without affordable housing near transportation, jobs, and necessary public services like safety, health care, and education. Housing is the most important asset for the majority of households and anchors...

There are persistent differences in homeownership rates across racial and ethnic groups. Homeownership rates for whites are over 20 percentage points higher than for blacks or Hispanics. This paper uses a model of the housing tenure decision to gain a better understanding of these racial and...

On the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act it is imperative to take a critical look at segregation and discrimination in the United States, and the opportunities and challenges associated with making progress on this pressing issue. In that spirit, we released a call for papers focusing on...

This paper studies the impact of transparency in the mortgage market on the underlying real estate markets. We show that geographic transparency in the secondary mortgage market, which implies geographic risk based pricing in the primary market, can limit risk-sharing and make house prices more...

This paper analyzes the inflation sensitivity of real estate investments, comparing them to other inflation-sensitive assets. The most transparent source of real estate investment returns comes from publicly traded stocks of real estate investment trusts (REITs). The authors examine the...

The U.S. housing finance system presents a conundrum for the scholar of regulation because it defies description using the traditional regulatory vocabulary of command-and-control, taxation, subsidies, cap-and-trade permits, and litigation. Instead, since the New Deal, the housing finance market...

There is little consensus as to the cause of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Numerous explanations exist: misguided monetary policy; a global savings surplus; government policies encouraging affordable homeownership; irrational consumer expectations of rising...

While other countries dismantled their segmented housing finance systems and linked housing finance to capital markets through deregulated depositories, the US linked housing finance to capital markets through depository deregulation and securitization. Elsewhere securitization has not...