Explaining the Housing Bubble

Adam Levitin and Susan Wachter

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: There is little consensus as to the cause of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Numerous explanations exist: misguided monetary policy; a global savings surplus; government policies encouraging affordable homeownership; irrational consumer expectations of rising housing prices; inelastic housing supply. None of these explanations, however, is capable of fully explaining the housing bubble. This Article posits a new explanation for the housing bubble. First, it demonstrates that the bubble was a supply-side phenomenon attributable to an excess of mispriced mortgage finance: mortgage-finance spreads declined and volume increased, even as risk increased—a confluence attributable only to an oversupply of mortgage finance. Second, it explains the mortgage-finance supply glut as resulting from the failure of markets to price risk correctly due to the complexity, opacity, and heterogeneity of the unregulated private-label mortgage-backed securities (PLS) that began to dominate the market in 2004. The rise of PLS exacerbated informational asymmetries between the financial institutions that intermediate mortgage finance and PLS investors. These intermediation agents exploited informational asymmetries to encourage overinvestment in PLS that boosted the financial intermediaries’ volume-based profits and enabled borrowers to bid up housing prices. This Article proposes the standardization of PLS as an information-forcing device. Reducing the complexity and heterogeneity of PLS would facilitate accurate risk pricing, which is necessary to rebuild a sustainable, stable housing-finance market.

Keywords: housing bubble; securitization; mortgage; MBS; RMBS; CMBS; PLS; Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; GSE; informational asymmetries; community reinvestment act; affordable housing goals; irrational exuberance; standardization; housing finance; real estate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K23 L15 L32 L50 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

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