Referred Articles
Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 23 No. 1, 2013, p. 5-27
Asset bubbles come and go. Only the housing bubble, however, brought the economy to its knees. Why? What makes housing uniquely a cause of macroeconomic risk? This article examines the workings of the housing market as well as theories and empirical evidence about the housing bubble. It explains why housing is a particular source of macroeconomic risk and how changes in the housing finance channel were the critical element in the formation of the bubble.
Atlantic Economic Journal, Vol. 40, 2012, p. 273
Mounting foreclosures and recent disclosures of abusive lending practices have led many states to adopt new anti-predatory lending laws. Researchers have examined the impact of such laws on credit flows and the cost of credit. This research extends the literature by examining if the market responded to these laws by substituting different mortgage products for those restricted by anti-predatory lending provisions. The evidence indicates that the new laws were effective in restricting loans with targeted characteristics and that the market substituted other product types to maintain affordability in the face of these restrictions.
Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 100, No.4, April 2012, p. 1177-1258)
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 housing prices; inelastic housing supply. None of these explanations, however, is capable of fully explaining the housing bubble. This Article posits a new explanation for the housing bubble. First, it demonstrates that the bubble was a supply-side phenomenon attributable to an excess of mispriced mortgage finance: mortgage-finance spreads declined and volume increased, even as risk increased — a confluence attributable only to an oversupply of mortgage finance. Second, it explains the mortgage-finance supply glut as resulting from the failure of markets to price risk correctly due to the complexity, opacity, and heterogeneity of the unregulated private-label mortgage-backed securities (PLS) that began to dominate the market in 2004. The rise of PLS exacerbated informational asymmetries between the financial institutions that intermediate mortgage finance and PLS investors. These intermediation agents exploited informational asymmetries to encourage overinvestment in PLS that boosted the financial intermediaries’ volume-based profits and enabled borrowers to bid up housing prices. This Article proposes the standardization of PLS as an information-forcing device. Reducing the complexity and heterogeneity of PLS would facilitate accurate risk pricing, which is necessary to rebuild a sustainable, stable housing-finance market.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol.3, No.2m May 2011m p. 169-188
What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive (native flight). To instrument for the actual number of new immigrants, we deploy a geographic diffusion model that predicts the number of new immigrants in a neighborhood using lagged densities of the foreign-born in surrounding neighborhoods. Subject to the validity of our instruments, the evidence is consistent with a causal interpretation of an impact from growing immigration density to native flight and relatively slower housing price appreciation. Further evidence indicates that these results may be driven more by the demand for residential segregation based on race and education than by foreignness per se.
Real Estate Economics, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 2011, p.1-17
This article establishes a theoretical and empirical link between the use of aggressive mortgage lending instruments, such as interest-only, negative-amortization or subprime mortgages, and the underlying house prices. Such instruments, which come into existence through innovation or financial deregulation, allow more borrowing than otherwise would occur in previously affordability-constrained markets. Within the context of a model with an endogenous rent-buy decision, we demonstrate that the supply of aggressive lending instruments temporarily increases the asset prices in the underlying market because agents find it more attractive to own or because their borrowing constraint is relaxed, or both. This result implies that the availability of aggressive mortgage lending instruments magnifies the real estate cycle and the effects of fundamental demand shocks. We empirically confirm the predictions of the model using recent subprime origination experience. In particular, we find that regions that receive a high concentration of aggressive lending instruments experience larger price increases and subsequent declines than areas with low concentration of such instruments. This result holds in the presence of various controls and instrumental variables.
Journal of Housing Economics, Vol. 19, No.3, September 2010, p. 219-232
We analyze the relationship between underwriting standards and low-income homeownership rates using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The survey respondents are a nationally representative sample of Americans mostly 40-48 years of age as of the most recent wave of the survey in 2004. Past research has identified credit impairment, wealth constraints, and income constraints as finance-related barriers to homeownership. Using a model of tenure choice, we find that absent all three constraints, the homeownership rate of low-income households in our sample would increase from 52.5 to 59.3 percent. Approximately half of this differential is attributable to households with impaired credit and those with ‘thin-file status,’ the lack of a substantial credit history.
International Real Estate Review, Vol. 13, No.2, 2010, p. 218-237
The present period of financial instability is also likely to become known as the end of an era, an era of economic calm and of policy consensus on how to maintain market stability. After World War II, the federal government operated on the Keynesian principles that the right mix of spending, regulation, and interest rates could tame economic cycles and eliminate surges of unemployment. In this period, now known as the Great Moderation, we assumed we knew how to prevent economic crises, such as the recurrence of the Great Depression. However, it is clear that those principles were erroneous as the economy has entered a lesser, but still severe downturn, the Great Recession. This paper looks at the sources of the ongoing economic crisis and points to the unique role in its origins of real estate asset bubbles and mispriced credit, not only in the origin of this crisis but of many financial crises. An analysis of the data points to the role of mispriced mortgage backed securities (MBS) in the spread of aggressive mortgage products and the unwarranted price speculation that resulted in massive foreclosures. In turn, the paper addresses the source of mispriced risk in MBS as incomplete markets in real estate and non-tradability of MBS and related securities which ultimately led to the collapse of financial system, threatening global economic health. The paper also suggests corrective measures that can and should be taken to assist the short and long term recovery.
Yale Journal on Regulations, Vol.26, No.1, Winter 2009, p. 445-455
With private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS), investors bore default risk; while this risk should have been priced, as systemic risk grew, the pricing of risk did not increase. This paper attempts to explain why this happened. We point to market institutions’ incentive misalignments that cause asset prices to rise above fundamentals, producing systemic risk. The model attributes the asset price inflation to the provision of underpriced credit as lending institutions misprice risk to gain market share. The resulting asset price inflation itself then generates further expansion of underpriced credit.
Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 41, May 2009, p. 1327-1375
Without regulation, securitization allowed mortgage industry actors to gain fees and to put off risks. During the housing boom, the ability to pass off risk allowed lenders and securitizers to compete for market share by lowering their lending standards, which activated more borrowing. Lenders who did not join in the easing of lending standards were crowded out of the market. Artificially low risk premia caused the asset price of houses to go up, leading to an asset bubble and breeding fraud. The consequences of lax lending were thereby covered up. The market might have corrected this problem if investors had been able to express their negative views by short selling mortgage-backed securities, thereby allowing fundamental market value to be achieved. However, the one instrument that could have been used to short sell mortgage-backed securities – the credit default swap – was also infected with underpricing due to lack of minimum capital requirements and regulation to facilitate transparent pricing. As a result, there was no opportunity for short selling in the private-label securitization market. The authors propose countercyclical regulation to prevent a race to the bottom at the height of the business cycle.