March 25, 2013
Building a Model for Housing Finance
Following up on Friday’s post, I want to discuss Chambers, Garriga and Schlagenhauf’s draft that they recently posted to SSRN (free here). It presents some interesting historical analogies to the issues we face as we attempt to chart a new direction for federal housing policy.
They too review the housing subsidies that exist in the financing system and in the tax code. They attempt to “study the effects of changes in government regulation on individual incentives and relative prices” (4) They include an interesting Table (2) on page 8 that shows the growing percentage of home mortgages that were insured or guaranteed by the FHA and VA.
What I find most interesting about this article is that it attempts to model the impact of better financing terms on the housing market. For instance, they argue that their “model suggest that the extension of the FRM contract from 20 to 30 years can explain around 12 percent of the increase in ownership” for a certain period of time. (25) More generally, they find that the “total impact of mortgage innovation is approximately 21 percent” when combined with “a narrowing mortgage interest rate wedge . . ..” (31) I would love to see more economics articles that model the impact of credit terms on housing prices and homeownership rates. While this seems fundamental to housing economics, there is less out there about this than there should be.
While their conclusion that “mortgage innovation did make a significant contribution to the increase in homeownership between 1940 and 1960” is not surprising, their model helps us understand why that is the case. (26)
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