Give me credit
Easy Credit as Social Safety Net? How Interest Rate Changes Affect US Social Policies
Andreas Wiedemann
MIT Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
Access to credit not only enables people to consume beyond their current income, but also increasingly determines life chances and access to basic social services. This paper argues that there is a trade-off between private credit and the welfare state and proposes a causal model of social policy-making where policymakers incorporate the availability of credit in their considerations of how to distribute welfare resources. Drawing on time-series cross-sectional data from US states, I first show that a decline in the share of denied mortgages is associated with lower health care and unemployment expenditures and a modest decline in unemployment insurance generosity. Secondly, I exploit exogenous variation in state-level mortgage interest rates induced by differential timing in bank branch deregulation to demonstrate that improved access to mortgage credit similarly decreases state-level health care and unemployment expenditures and unemployment insurance generosity. The findings of this paper provide causal evidence that easier access to credit lowers state-level public health and unemployment expenditures. These credit flows to families enabled policymakers to shift the burden of social policies from the domain of the publicly financed welfare state into the domain of privately-funded market-driven welfare state. The transition toward a credit-based welfare state has broad socioeconomic consequences. Credit can serve as an alternative form of or substitute for social redistribution and social insurance, but it cannot replace it because the distributional and stratifying implications are not the same as in the case of publicly provided social policies.
---------------------
Asset Quality Misrepresentation by Financial Intermediaries: Evidence from the RMBS Market
Tomasz Piskorski, Amit Seru & James Witkin
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We document that contractual disclosures by intermediaries during the sale of mortgages contained false information about the borrower's housing equity in 7–14% of loans. The rate of misrepresented loan default was 70% higher than for similar loans. These misrepresentations likely occurred late in the intermediation and exist among securities sold by all reputable intermediaries. Investors – including large institutions – holding securities with misrepresented collateral suffered severe losses due to loan defaults, price declines, and ratings downgrades. Pools with misrepresentations were not issued at a discount. Misrepresentation on another easy-to-quantify dimension shows that these effects are a conservative lower bound.
---------------------
Regional Redistribution Through the U.S. Mortgage Market
Erik Hurst et al.
NBER Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which households can use borrowing to smooth location-specific risks depends crucially on the interest rate and how it varies with local economic conditions. In the U.S., the bulk of borrowing occurs through the mortgage market and is heavily influenced by the presence of government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). We empirically establish that despite large spatial variation in predictable default risk, there is essentially no spatial variation in GSE mortgage rates, conditional on borrower observables. In contrast, we show that the private market does set interest rates based in part on regional risk factors and postulate that the lack of regional variation in GSE mortgage rates is likely driven by political pressure. We quantify the economic impact of the national interest rate policy on regional risk by building a structural spatial model of collateralized borrowing to match various features from our empirical analysis. The model suggests that the national interest rate policy has significant ex-post redistributional consequences across regions.
---------------------
Insolvency after the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform
Stefania Albanesi & Jaromir Nosal
Federal Reserve Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
Using a comprehensive panel data set on U.S. households, we study the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), the most substantive reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States since the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The 2005 legislation introduced a means test based on income to establish eligibility for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and increased the administrative requirements to file, leading to a rise in the opportunity cost and, especially, the financial cost of filing for bankruptcy. We study the effects of the reform on bankruptcy, insolvency, and foreclosure. We find that the reform caused a permanent drop in the Chapter 7 bankruptcy rate relative to pre-reform levels, due to the rise in filing costs associated with the reform, which can be interpreted as resulting from liquidity constraints. We find that the decline in bankruptcy filings resulted in a rise in the rate and persistence of insolvency as well as an increase in the rate of foreclosure. We find no evidence of a link between the decline in bankruptcy and a rise in the number of individuals who are current on their debt. We document that these effects are concentrated at the bottom of the income distribution, suggesting that the income means tests introduced by BAPCPA did not serve as an effective screening device. We show that insolvency is associated with worse financial outcomes than bankruptcy, as insolvent individuals have less access to new lines of credit and display lower credit scores than individuals who file for bankruptcy. Since bankruptcy filings declined much more for low income individuals, our findings suggest that BAPCPA may have removed an important form of relief from financial distress for this group.
---------------------
Duration of bankruptcy proceedings and monetary policy effectiveness
Uluc Aysun
Journal of Macroeconomics, June 2015, Pages 295–302
Abstract:
A common assumption in well-known costly-state-verification frameworks is that when a borrower defaults, creditors receive a payoff immediately (after incurring bankruptcy costs). While this assumption enhances tractability, it is unrealistic given the considerable delays in the actual practice of bankruptcy. In this paper, I identify the duration of bankruptcy proceedings as an additional source of friction in financial markets and investigate the relationship between this friction and the effectiveness of monetary policy by using U.S. state-level data. Consistent with the commonly-observed positive relationship between the degree of standard financial frictions and the amplitude of macroeconomic responses, I find that U.S. monetary policy is most effective in states with longer bankruptcy proceedings.
---------------------
Appraisal inflation: Evidence from 2009 GSE HVCC intervention
Lan Shi & Yan Zhang
Journal of Housing Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Appraisal inflation is a prominent aspect of lax underwriting practice. The GSE May 2009 Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC) aims to prohibit lenders from influencing appraisers. Refinance loans, without a transaction price, are potentially more susceptible to appraisal inflation than purchase loans. We use GSE refinance loans as our treatment group and non-GSE refinance loans as the control group, and find that GSE refinance loans originated after May 2009 have lower default rates than non-GSE refinance loans. We further measure the appraisal inflation (bias) as the difference between the appraisal value in a 2009 refinance transaction and the actual transaction price in an earlier purchase transaction for the same property adjusted for local housing value changes. We find that the reduction in appraisal bias was larger for GSE refinance loans than for non-GSE refinance loans. This paper quantifies the “contribution” of appraisal inflation in poor loan underwriting standards and highlights the importance of unbiased and independent appraisal.
---------------------
Bankruptcy Rates among NFL Players with Short-Lived Income Spikes
Kyle Carlson et al.
NBER Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
One of the central predictions of the life cycle hypothesis is that individuals smooth consumption over their economic life cycle; thus, they save when income is high, in order to provide for when income is likely to be low, such as after retirement. We test this prediction in a group of people — players in the National Football League (NFL) — whose income profile does not just gradually rise then fall, as it does for most workers, but rather has a very large spike lasting only a few years. We collected data on all players drafted by NFL teams from 1996 to 2003. Given the difficulty of directly measuring consumption of NFL players, we test whether they have adequate savings by counting how many retired NFL players file for bankruptcy. Contrary to the life-cycle model predictions, we find that initial bankruptcy filings begin very soon after retirement and continue at a substantial rate through at least the first 12 years of retirement. Moreover, bankruptcy rates are not affected by a player’s total earnings or career length. Having played for a long time and been well-paid does not provide much protection against the risk of going bankrupt.
---------------------
Crowding Out Effects of Refinancing on New Purchase Mortgages
Steven Sharpe & Shane Sherlund
Federal Reserve Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
We present evidence that binding mortgage processing capacity constraints reduce mortgage originations to borrowers of low to modest credit quality. Mortgage processing capacity constraints typically bind when the demand for mortgage refinancing shifts outward, usually because of lower mortgage rates. As a result, high capacity utilization leads mortgage lenders to ration mortgage credit, completing mortgages that require less underwriting resources, and are thus less costly, to produce. This is hypothesized to have a particularly adverse impact on the ability of low- to modest-credit-quality borrowers to obtain mortgages. What is more, we show that, by lowering capacity utilization, a rise in interest rates can, under certain circumstances, induce an increase in mortgage originations to borrowers of low to modest credit quality. In particular, we find fairly large effects for purchasing borrowers of modest credit quality, in which we find that a decrease in capacity utilization of 4 applications per mortgage employee (similar to that observed from 2012 to 2013) could result in increased purchase mortgage originations, as the relaxed capacity constraint at least partially offsets the higher cost of mortgage credit.
---------------------
Consumer Bankruptcy and Financial Health
Will Dobbie, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Crystal Yang
NBER Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
This paper estimates the effect of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on post-filing financial outcomes using a new dataset linking bankruptcy filings to credit bureau records. Our empirical strategy uses the leniency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrument for Chapter 13 protection. Over the first five post-filing years, we find that Chapter 13 protection decreases an index measuring adverse financial events such as civil judgments and repossessions by 0.316 standard deviations, increases the probability of being a homeowner by 13.2 percentage points, and increases credit scores by 14.9 points. Chapter 13 protection has little impact on open unsecured debt, but decreases the amount of debt in collections by $1,315.
---------------------
Estimating Loan-to-Value Distributions
Arthur Korteweg & Morten Sorensen
Real Estate Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate a model of house prices, combined loan-to-value ratios (CLTVs) and trade and foreclosure behavior. House prices are only observed for traded properties and trades are endogenous, creating sample-selection problems for existing approaches to estimating CLTVs. We use a Bayesian filtering procedure to recover the price path for individual properties and produce selection-corrected estimates of historical CLTV distributions. Estimating our model with transactions of residential properties in Alameda, California, we find that 35% of single-family homes are underwater, compared to 19% estimated by existing approaches. Our results reduce the index revision problem and have applications for pricing mortgage-backed securities.
---------------------
House Price Impacts of Racial, Income, Education, and Age Neighborhood Segregation
David Brasington, Diane Hite & Andres Jauregui
Journal of Regional Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study housing prices and neighborhood segregation. We advance the literature by (1) studying not just racial segregation like previous studies, but also segregation by age, income, and education level, (2) using a finer unit of geography to construct segregation measures, (3) incorporating spatial statistics, and (4) separating segregation effects from underlying population level effects. We find race segregation is positively related to house prices, with an elasticity of 0.19. In contrast, income and educational segregation reduce housing values, with elasticities of −0.23 and −0.21. By comparison, house age has an elasticity of −0.15. Age segregation is not generally capitalized.
---------------------
Information Losses in Home Purchase Appraisals
Paul Calem, Lauren Lambie-Hanson & Leonard Nakamura
Federal Reserve Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraisals are rarely below the transaction price. We exploit a unique data set to show that the mortgage application process creates an incentive to substitute the transaction price for the true appraised value when the latter is lower. We relate the frequency of information loss (appraisals set equal to transaction price) to market conditions and other factors that plausibly determine the degree of distortion. Information loss in appraisals may increase the procyclicality of housing booms and busts.
---------------------
Learning from Performance: Banks, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and the Credit Crisis
Kim Pernell-Gallagher
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates how firms in competitive markets use external examples to assess the value of novel practices, focusing on the substantively important case of collateralized debt obligation (CDO) underwriting among US investment and commercial banks, 1996–2007. Diffusion researchers have struggled to adjudicate between competing mechanisms of social contagion, including imitation and learning. I use event-history methods to examine how banks responded to the activities and results of other CDO underwriters. I show that banks learned superstitiously from the share price performance of other CDO underwriters; as the popularity of CDO underwriting increased, banks became even more attentive to confirmatory evidence on this dimension. These findings suggest important refinements to theories of social contagion, especially neoinstitutional theory. By focusing on ordinary organizational processes in an extraordinary context, I uncover an alternative explanation for the rise of complex securitization, with implications for current understandings of the credit crisis.
---------------------
The Paradox of Judicial Foreclosure: Collateral Value Uncertainty and Mortgage Rates
David Harrison & Michael Seiler
Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, April 2015, Pages 377-411
Abstract:
Using a sample of 26,892 rate quotes on home purchase loan applications, the current paper investigates interstate variation in residential mortgage interest rates. More specifically, we find posted rate quotes by lenders are directly related to measures of foreclosure process risk including the length of time required to complete foreclosure proceedings within a jurisdiction and the presence (and length) of statutory redemption periods. Mortgage rates are also found to be contingent upon differential underwriting fees and conditions, housing appreciation and volatility measures, and the competitive nature of the economic marketplace in which each lender operates. In contrast to the previous literature, we find the judicial foreclosure process requirements exert little to no impact on observable mortgage interest rate quotes after controlling for these additional dimensions of risk.
---------------------
Jonathan Heathcote & Fabrizio Perri
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
Periods of low household wealth in United States macroeconomic history have also been periods of high business cycle volatility. This paper develops a simple model that can exhibit self-fulfilling fluctuations in the expected path for unemployment. The novel feature is that the scope for sunspot-driven volatility depends on the level of household wealth. When wealth is high, consumer demand is largely insensitive to unemployment expectations and the economy is robust to confidence crises. When wealth is low, a stronger precautionary motive makes demand more sensitive to unemployment expectations, and the economy becomes vulnerable to confidence-driven fluctuations. In this case, there is a potential role for public policies to stabilize demand. Microeconomic evidence is consistent with the key model mechanism: during the Great Recession, households with relatively low wealth, ceteris paribus, cut expenditures more sharply.
---------------------
A quantitative analysis of the U.S. housing and mortgage markets and the foreclosure crisis
Satyajit Chatterjee & Burcu Eyigungor
Review of Economic Dynamics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present a model of long-duration collateralized debt with risk of default. Applied to the housing market, it can match the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate, and the lower tail of the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners prior to the recent crisis. We stress the role of favorable tax treatment of housing in matching these facts. We then use the model to account for the foreclosure crisis in terms of three shocks: overbuilding, financial frictions and foreclosure delays. The financial friction shock accounts for much of the house price decline while the foreclosure delays account for bulk of the rise in foreclosures. The scale of the foreclosure crisis might have been smaller if mortgage interest payments were not tax deductible. Temporarily higher inflation might have lowered the foreclosure rate as well.