Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'mortgage'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 13
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Working PaperHousing Capital and Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-55
Housing represents the most important capital asset for most U.S. families. Despite substantial analysis of the intergenerational mobility of income, large gaps in our knowledge of the distribution of housing assets and their transmission over time remain, as housing is generally not reflected by income flows. Using novel linked data that combines survey responses with administrative tax data and information on ownership and valuation from property tax records for over 3.4 million families, we provide new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of housing capital. We find that housing capital is more persistent across generations than labor income. We document important disparities between average housing outcomes for White and Black children. These difference persist even conditional on parent rank in the distribution of housing assets, with the gap growing throughout the parental housing capital distribution. A decomposition shows that average differences in children's labor market outcomes associated with parental assets explain about half of the observed intergenerational persistence (a 'labor income channel'), and that there is also a substantial 'direct channel' ' conditional on children having the same earnings, children of parents with more housing assets have more assets themselves on average. The direct channel is also important for explaining the intergenerational gap in outcomes of Black and White children. Finally, we present quasi-experimental evidence that local housing supply constraints help explain spatial differences in intergenerational persistence across US counties. Our results establish the importance of housing markets, both independently from and jointly with labor markets, in shaping the intergenerational persistence of economic resources.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCredit Access in the United States
July 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-45
We construct new population-level linked administrative data to study households' access to credit in the United States. These data reveal large differences in credit access by race, class, and hometown. By age 25, Black individuals, those who grew up in low-income families, and those who grew up in certain areas (including the Southeast and Appalachia) have significantly lower credit scores than other groups. Consistent with lower scores generating credit constraints, these individuals have smaller balances, more credit inquiries, higher credit card utilization rates, and greater use of alternative higher-cost forms of credit. Tests for alternative definitions of algorithmic bias in credit scores yield results in opposite directions. From a calibration perspective, group-level differences in credit scores understate differences in delinquency: conditional on a given credit score, Black individuals and those from low-income families fall delinquent at relatively higher rates. From a balance perspective, these groups receive lower credit scores even when comparing those with the same future repayment behavior. Addressing both of these biases and expanding credit access to groups with lower credit scores requires addressing group-level differences in delinquency rates. These delinquencies emerge soon after individuals access credit in their early twenties, often due to missed payments on credit cards, student loans, and other bills. Comprehensive measures of individuals' income profiles, income volatility, and observed wealth explain only a small portion of these repayment gaps. In contrast, we find that the large variation in repayment across hometowns mostly reflects the causal effect of childhood exposure to these places. Places that promote upward income mobility also promote repayment and expand credit access even conditional on income, suggesting that common place-level factors may drive behaviors in both credit and labor markets. We discuss suggestive evidence for several mechanisms that drive our results, including the role of social and cultural capital. We conclude that gaps in credit access by race, class, and hometown have roots in childhood environments.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMeasuring the Business Dynamics of Firms that Received Pandemic Relief Funding: Findings from a New Experimental BDS Data Product
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-05
This paper describes a new experimental data product from the U.S. Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies: the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) of firms that received Small Business Administration (SBA) pandemic funding. This new product, BDS-SBA COVID, expands the set of currently published BDS tables by linking loan-level program participation data from SBA to internal business microdata at the U.S. Census Bureau. The linked programs include the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loans (COVID-EIDL), the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF), and Shuttered Venue Operators Grants (SVOG). Using these linked data, we tabulate annual firm and establishment counts, measures of job creation and destruction, and establishment entry and exit for recipients and non-recipients of program funds in 2020-2021. We further stratify the tables by timing of loan receipt and loan size, and business characteristics including geography, industry sector, firm size, and firm age. We find that for the youngest firms that received PPP, the timing of receipt mattered. Receiving an early loan correlated with a lower job destruction rate compared to non-recipients and businesses that received a later loan. For the smallest firms, simply participating in PPP was associated with lower employment loss. The timing of PPP receipt was also related to establishment exit rates. For businesses of nearly all ages, those that received an early loan exited at a lower rate in 2022 than later loan recipients.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Impact of Parental Resources on Human Capital Investment and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Great Recession
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-34
I study the impact of parents' financial resources during adolescence on postsecondary human capital investment and labor market outcomes, using house value changes during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 as a natural experiment. I use several restricted-access datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau to create a novel dataset that includes intergenerational linkages between children and their parents. This data allows me to exploit house value variation within labor markets, addressing the identification concern that local house values are related to local economic conditions. I find that the average decrease to parents' home values lead to persistent decreases in bachelor's degree attainment of 1.26%, earnings of 1.96%, and full-time employment of 1.32%. Children of parents suffering larger house value shocks are more likely to substitute into two-year degree programs, drop out of college, or be enrolled in a college program in their late 20s.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Long-run Effects of the 1930s Redlining Maps on Children
December 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-56
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 Census. We use two identification strategies to estimate the potential long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first strategy compares cross-boundary differences along HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had statistically similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach only uses boundaries that were least likely to have been chosen by the HOLC based on our statistical model. We find that children living on the lower-graded side of HOLC boundaries had significantly lower levels of educational attainment, reduced income in adulthood, and lived in neighborhoods during adulthood characterized by lower educational attainment, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of single-headed households.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperNeighborhood Income and Material Hardship in the United States
January 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-01
U.S. households face a number of economic challenges that affect their well-being. In this analysis we focus on the extent to which neighborhood economic conditions contribute to hardship. Specifically, using data from the 2008 and 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation panel surveys and logistic regression, we analyze the extent to which neighborhoods income levels affect the likelihood of experiencing seven types of hardships, including trouble paying bills, medical need, food insecurity, housing hardship, ownership of basic consumer durables, neighborhood problems, and fear of crime. We find strong bivariate relationships between neighborhood income and all hardships, but for most hardships these are explained by other household characteristics, such as household income and education. However, neighborhood income retains a strong association with two hardships in particular even when controlling for a variety of other household characteristics: neighborhood conditions (such as the presence of trash and litter) and fear of crime. Our study highlights the importance of examining multiple measures when assessing well-being, and our findings are consistent with the notion that collective socialization and community-level structural features affect the likelihood that households experience deleterious neighborhood conditions and a fear of crime.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperHow Collateral Affects Small Business Lending: The Role of Lender Specialization
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-22
I study the role of collateral on small business credit access in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I construct a novel, loan-level dataset covering all collateralized small business lending in Texas from 2002-2016 and link it to the U.S. Census of Establishments. Using textual analysis, I show that post-2008, lenders reduced credit supply to borrowers outside of the lender's collateral specialization. This result holds when comparing lending to the same borrower from different lenders, and when comparing lending by the same lender to different borrowers. A one standard deviation higher specialization in collateral increases lending to the same firm by 3.7%. Abstracting from general equilibrium effects, if firms switched to lenders with the highest specialization in their collateral, aggregate lending would increase by 14.8%. Furthermore, firms borrowing from lenders with greater specialization in the borrower's collateral see a larger growth in employment after 2008. Finally, I show that firms with collateral more frequently accepted by lenders in the economy find it easier to switch lenders. In sum, my paper shows that borrowing from specialized lenders increases access to credit and employment during a financial crisis.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperHome Equity Lending, Credit Constraints and Small Business in the US
October 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-32
We use Texas's constitutional amendment in 1997 that expanded the scope of home equity loans as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the effects of relaxing credit constraints on small businesses. We find, using standard panel data methods and restricted-use microdata from the US Census Bureau, that the Texas amendment increased the use of home equity finance by small businesses, increased new business and job creation and reduced establishment exit and job loss. The effects are larger and significant for businesses with fewer than ten employees.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWho Files for Personal Bankruptcy in the United States?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-54
Who files for bankruptcy in the United States is not well understood. Previous research relied on small samples from national surveys or a small number of states from administrative records. I use over 10 million administrative bankruptcy records linked to the 2000 Decennial Census and the 2001-2009 American Community Surveys to understand who files for personal bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filers are middle income, more likely to be divorced, more likely to be black, more likely to have terminal high school degree or some college, and more likely to be middle-aged. Bankruptcy filers are more likely to be employed than the U.S. as a whole, and they are more likely to be employed 50-52 weeks. The bankruptcy population is aging faster than the U.S. population as a whole. Lastly, using the pseudo-panels I study what happens in the years around bankruptcy. Individuals are likely to get divorced in the years before bankruptcy and then remarry. Income falls before bankruptcy and then rises after bankruptcy.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFirm Leverage, Consumer Demand, and Employment Losses during the Great Recession
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-01
We argue that firms' balance sheets were instrumental in the propagation of consumer demand shocks during the Great Recession. Using establishment-level data, we show that establishments of more highly levered firms exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in response to a drop in consumer demand. These results are not driven by firms being less productive, having expanded too much prior to the Great Recession, or being generally more sensitive to fluctuations in either aggregate employment or house prices. At the county level, we find that counties with more highly levered firms experience significantly larger job losses in response to county-wide consumer demand shocks. Thus, firms' balance sheets also matter for aggregate employment. Our research suggests a possible role for employment policies that target firms directly besides conventional stimulus.View Full Paper PDF
