Credit supply shocks, home purchase volume, and borrowing behavior

James N. Conklin, Haoyang Liu () and Calvin Zhang

Real Estate Economics, 2024, vol. 52, issue 2, 486-513

Abstract: We exploit the 2007 private label securitization (PLS) freeze as a quasi‐experiment to study the impact of a negative credit supply shock on home purchases and borrowing behavior. Using a difference‐in‐differences estimator, we show that a negative supply shock to first‐lien mortgages has little impact on the volume of purchases financed with a mortgage, but significantly reduces the average first‐lien loan balance. Much of this reduction in loan balances is the result of increased bunching at the conforming loan limit that is achieved through a combination of greater second mortgage utilization and larger downpayments. Importantly, we find significant heterogeneity in the response to the mortgage supply shock across borrower characteristics and house price levels. Home purchase volume does decline after the shock for less creditworthy borrowers and in expensive locations. The reduction in first‐lien balances is fairly uniform across borrower types, however, the effect is slightly more acute in less expensive areas. Our results suggest that financial market frictions (e.g., downpayment constraints, imperfect credit) play an important role in determining how credit supply shocks impact housing purchases and borrowing behavior.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12462

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:reesec:v:52:y:2024:i:2:p:486-513

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1080-8620

Access Statistics for this article

Real Estate Economics is currently edited by Crocker Liu, N. Edward Coulson and Walter Torous

More articles in Real Estate Economics from American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().