Does Household Finance Affect the Political Process? Evidence from Voter Turnout During a Housing Crisis

Loan originations and defaults in the mortgage crisis: The role of the middle class

W Ben McCartney

The Review of Financial Studies, 2021, vol. 34, issue 2, 949-984

Abstract: I examine the effect of house price declines on voter participation using a novel person-level panel data set. Contrary to what the “angry voter hypothesis” predicts, I find that a 10% decline in local house prices decreases the participation rate of the average mortgaged homeowner by 1.6 percentage points. Consistent with a financial distress channel, house price declines have no effects on renters and particularly severe effects on highly leveraged households. My findings are consistent with the existence of a feedback loop between financial distress and inequality operating through voter participation.

JEL-codes: D10 D72 H31 R20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhaa064 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:rfinst:v:34:y:2021:i:2:p:949-984.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().