Does monetary policy influence who becomes a homeowner? Lower-income home buyers may be more sensitive to interest rates, at least in part because they more frequently come up against binding payment-to-income ratio constraints in credit decisions. Exploiting the timing of high-frequency observations of individual mortgage rate locks around monetary policy shocks, I find that a 1 percentage point policy-induced increase in mortgage rates lowers the presence of lower-income households in the population of home buyers by 1 to 2 percentage points immediately following the shock. Effects are substantially stronger among first-time home buyers and persist for approximately one year.

ABSTRACT We assess racial discrimination in mortgage approvals using confidential data on mortgage applications. Minority applicants tend to have lower credit scores and higher leverage, and are less likely to receive algorithmic approval from race‐blind automated underwriting systems (AUS). Observable applicant‐risk factors explain most of the racial disparities in lender denials. Further, exploiting the AUS data, we show there are risk factors we do not observe, and these factors at least partially explain the residual 1 to 2 percentage point denial gaps. We conclude that differential treatment plays a more limited role in generating denial disparities than previous research suggests.

This paper provides novel evidence that increased student loan debts, caused by rising tuitions, increase borrowers’ demand for additional consumer debt, while simultaneously restricting their ability to access it. The net effect of student loan debt on consumer borrowing varies by market, depending on whether the supply or demand channel dominates. In loosely underwritten credit markets, increased student loan debt causes borrowing to increase, while in tightly underwritten markets, increased student loan debt reduces credit use. These findings match predictions of a standard life cycle model of household consumption and borrowing, augmented by a realistic student loan repayment contract. (JEL G51, D15, I22, D14)

We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student's home state. A $1, 000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public 4-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership. Validity tests suggest that the results are not confounded by local economic conditions or changes in educational outcomes.