A Depressing Scenario: Mortgage Debt Becomes Unemployment Insurance

Casey Mulligan

No 14514, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: When asset values fall, the owners of collateralized loans are not in an enviable position. Nonetheless, they possess a kind of monopoly power over their borrowers that they do not possess when borrowers are solvent. Lenders maximize profits by price discriminating, but create deadweight costs in the process. From the perspective of the aggregate labor market, it is as if lenders were levying their own labor income tax, on top of the taxes already levied by public treasuries. Governments have an incentive to regulate this price discrimination, repudiate part of the private debts, cut their own tax rates, or acquire the debt themselves. These conditions may describe both the 1930s and economic events today.

JEL-codes: E24 H21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-ure
Note: EFG ME PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14514.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:14514

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().