Date of Graduation

12-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Finance

Advisor/Mentor

Timothy Yeager

Committee Member

Wayne Lee

Second Committee Member

Scott Hsu

Keywords

Residential mortgage market

Abstract

My dissertation examines the relationship between bank conditions and the residential mortgage market. The first essay investigates the effect of bank distress on the residential mortgage market during the 2007-09 financial crisis. We use the county-aggregated change in the ratio of jumbo to nonjumbo mortgage acceptance rate as an instrumental variable to control for endogeneity between bank distress and county economic conditions. The median decrease in the instrumental variable explains an additional 1.5 percentage point decline in county home prices and a 20 basis point rise in the county unemployment rate, which represent 15% and 5%, respectively, of their median changes between 2007 and 2009. The second essay investigates how changes in bank credit standards between 2001 and 2006 affected county-level credit supply for residential mortgages. We introduce the ratio of conventional loan acceptance rate to FHA loan acceptance rate as a more accurate measure of residential credit standard than SLOOS. The ratio shows that credit standards eased significantly between 2001 and 2006, which increased mortgage originations and contributed to the housing boom. A one standard deviation weakening in credit standards leads to a 1.4% increase in loan acceptance rate, which represents 18.5% of the standard deviation in loan acceptance rate between 2001 and 2006.

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