We show that a contraction of mortgage supply after the Great Recession has increased housing rents. Our empirical strategy exploits heterogeneity in MSAs' exposure to regulatory shocks experienced by lenders over the 2010-2014 period. Tighter lending standards have increased demand for rental housing and have led to higher rents, depressed homeownership rates and an increase in rental supply. Absent the credit supply contraction, annual rent growth would have been 2.1 percentage points lower over 2010-2014 in MSAs where lending standards rose from their 2008 levels.

We analyze a model of mortgage markets, housing tenure choice, heterogeneous agents, and default with closed form solutions. We uncover new insights which may inspire empirical work, and we ground already established insights in a series of tractable expressions. Then we study optimal loan‐to‐value (LTV) regulation and show that the choice of an LTV cap should balance the opposing forces of access to homeownership and the negative externalities associated with default. Homeownership affordability concerns induce procyclical elements into optimal regulation which attenuate the countercyclical regulation justified by the negative default externalities.

ABSTRACT: All‐cash homebuyers account for one‐third of U.S. home purchases between 1980 and 2017. We use multiple data sets and research designs to robustly estimate that mortgaged buyers pay an 11% premium over all‐cash buyers to compensate home sellers for mortgage transaction frictions. A dynamic, representative‐seller model implies only a 3% premium, which would suggest an 8% puzzle. Accounting for heterogeneity in selling conditions explains half of this difference, but a puzzle holds in conditions with high transaction risk. An experimental survey of U.S. homeowners replicates these patterns and suggests that belief distortions can explain the puzzle in these high‐risk states.

Abstract We show how securitization affects the size of the nonbank lending sector through a novel price-based channel. We identify the channel using a regulatory spillover shock to the cross-section of mortgage-backed security prices: the U.S. liquidity coverage ratio. The shock increases secondary market prices for FHA-insured loans by granting them favorable regulatory status once securitized. Higher prices lower nonbanks’ funding costs, prompting them to loosen lending standards and originate more FHA-insured loans. This channel accounts for 22% of nonbanks’ growth in overall mortgage market share over 2013–2015. While the shock creates risks for financial stability, homeownership also increases.