Tag Archives: Weiss

Borrowing Constraints and The Homeownership Rate

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Arthur Acolin, Jess Bricker, Paul Calem and Susan Wachter have posted a short paper on Borrowing Constraints and Homeownership to SSRN. The abstract reads,

This paper identifies the impact of borrowing constraints on home ownership in the U.S. in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The existence of credit rationing in the U.S. mortgage market means that some households for whom it would be optimal to choose to be homeowners may not be able to do so. Borrowers with certain wealth, income and credit characteristics are unable to obtain a loan even if they are willing to pay a higher cost of credit (Linneman and Wachter 1989). The Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) canonical model sets up the rationale for this credit rationing. Using data from the 2001, 2004-2007 and 2010-2013 Surveys of Consumer Finance (SCF), this paper measures the impact of changes in the income, wealth and credit constraints on the probability of home ownership. Credit supply eased and then became considerably more restricted in the wake of the Great Recession. The loosening of borrowing constraints was accompanied by an increase in home ownership from the late 1990s until the start of the housing crisis. In this paper we estimate the role the tightening of credit has had on the probability of individual households to become homeowners and the decline in the aggregate home ownership rate following the crisis. The home ownership rate in 2010-2013 is predicted to be 5.2 percentage points lower than it would be if the constraints were at the 2004-2007 level and 2.3 percentage points lower than if the constraints were set at the 2001 level.

This paper builds on some of the other work of the authors (see here for instance) on the homeownership rate. The paper makes a valuable contribution by estimating the impact of credit rationing on the homeownership rate. To the extent we can identify an optimal amount of credit supply, it should help us to determine a target homeownership rate to guide policymakers.

Home Equity Insurance: Only Good in Theory?

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Smith and Harper have posted Home Equity Insurance & The Demise of Home Value Insurance Corporation to SSRN.  The abstract reads,

This study uses the demise of the Home Value Insurance Company (HVIC) to explore whether the concept of home equity insurance is implementable. Shiller, R. and Weiss, A. (1999) and Goetzmann, W., Caplin, A., Hangen, E., Nalebuff, B., Prentce, E., Rodkin, J., Spiegel, M. and Skinner, T. (2003) have provided a platform to evaluate this concept by questioning whether a product that allows homeowners to transfer the risk associated with a decline in housing prices should be structured as insurance. This study explores the cost associated, in the U.S. Real Estate Market, with this risk transfer process in the pre- and post-mortgage crisis periods by simulating the cost of insurance using the theoretical pricing of ATM (at the money) put options based upon the Black Scholes Option Pricing Model from 1989 to 2013. As the U.S. Housing Market transitioned from the pre-crisis to the post-crisis periods the hypothetical breakeven cost of insurance increased from 0.60% to 20.85% of the starting value of the index. The demise of HVIC seems to be a cautionary tale: Given the recent changes in the underlying dynamics of the U.S. Real Estate Market it does not seem prudent (for insurers) to use insurance contracts to transfer the risk associated with a decline in the value of U.S. Residential Equity Wealth.

This is all a bit technical, but basically it is an investigation of a clever idea that did not seem to pan out. Robert Shiller and others proposed that home owners could insure against a decrease in the value of their home.  But a company based on that proposal failed in its first year of operation. The article finds that the cost of such insurance would be unsustainable. I am not sure that this article definitively demonstrates that this concept is impossible to implement, but it certainly raises a lot of questions that would need to be answered if someone were to want to give it another go.