New model identifies levers for stability for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit
2021-06-14
(Press-News.org) In 2007, the American housing boom ended, and there was heightened risk of a housing crisis. Private securitizers withdrew from purchasing high-risk mortgages, while government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, dramatically increased their acquisitions of risky mortgages. By 2008, the agencies reversed course, decreasing their high-risk acquisitions.
In a new article, an economist proposes a scenario in which large lenders temporarily boost high-risk activity at the end of a boom. According to her model, lenders with many outstanding mortgages have incentives to extend risky credit to prop up housing prices, which lessens the losses on their outstanding portfolio of mortgages. As the bust continues, lenders slowly wind down their mortgage exposure.
The article, by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), appears in The Review of Financial Studies, a journal of the Society for Financial Studies.
"As policymakers discuss whether to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the aftermath of the 2018 housing crisis, this model contributes to a deeper understanding of policies that ensure the stability of the financial system," suggests Deeksha Gupta, Assistant Professor of Finance at CMU's Tepper School of Business, the author of the article.
In her model, Gupta addresses how concentration in mortgage markets can affect both the quantity and quality of mortgage credit. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, currently in government conservatorship, accounted for 61 percent of all outstanding U.S. mortgage debt in February 2019.
The propping up effect can stabilize housing prices, but may also cause greater financial fragility by increasing housing defaults in later periods during a bust. Therefore, this dynamic is important to consider when deciding on the future of the enterprises, Gupta argues.
In the aftermath of the housing crisis, policymakers expressed interest in designing policies to curb high-risk lending. But the role concentration can play in creating incentives to extend risky mortgage credit has been largely overlooked, Gupta contends.
"While the model I propose focuses on the 2008 housing crisis, it can be applied more generally," Gupta says. "For example, the model can be used when considering housing policy since 2009, which aimed at stabilizing housing markets."
The research reported in Gupta's article was supported by the Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-06-14
BOSTON - The cost of cancer care in United States was an estimated $183 billion in 2015 and is projected to rise by 30 percent by 2030, according to the American Cancer Society. While private and government insurance may cover much of the cost of care, even patients with insurance can struggle to pay for office visit co-payments, prescription medications or other cancer-related expenses. Yet limited data describes how financial hardship impacts patient behavior and how that in turn may impact patient health.
In a new study designed to provide a more comprehensive picture of how a diverse cohort of gynecologic cancer patients are affected by financial distress -- also called "financial toxicity" in acknowledgment of the health ...
2021-06-14
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- When two similar atomic layers with mismatching lattice constants -- the constant distance between a layer's unit cells -- and/or orientation are stacked together, the resulting bilayer can exhibit a moiré pattern and form a moiré superlattice.
Moiré patterns are interference patterns that typically arise when one object with a repetitive pattern is placed over another with a similar pattern. Moiré superlattices, formed by atomic layers, can exhibit fascinating phenomena not found in the individual layers, opening the door to technological revolutions in many areas, including electricity transmission, information engineering, and ...
2021-06-14
White men who had a Black neighbor when they were growing up are more likely to be Democrats and less likely to be Republican, an influence that can last several decades later.
That's according to a Harvard study published Friday in Science Advances that takes individual level data from 650,000 Americans recorded in the 1940 U.S. Census. Using machine learning, the analysis links those records to contemporary voter files to see if there are correlations between having a Black neighbor as a child and political views later in life. The paper includes only men because the common practice of surname changes at marriage made it difficult to accurately track women.
The scientists found that those 650,000 white men who had a Black neighbor growing up are believed to be more likely ...
2021-06-14
There is no question that the pandemic has been immensely stressful for health care workers, especially for those on the frontline of patient care. Yet, even before the pandemic, the regular demands of many health care industry jobs put these workers at risk for burnout.
Now, a new study from the University of Georgia suggests that investing in more physical activity programming could mitigate the effects of stress and improve worker mental and emotional health.
Tackling burnout in health care is critical to ensuring patient safety, said lead author Marilyn ...
2021-06-14
(Boston)-- Prevalence rates of opioid use disorder (OUD) have increased dramatically, accompanied by a surge of overdose deaths--nearly 50,000 in the U.S. in 2019. While opioid dependence has been extensively studied in preclinical models, an understanding of the biological alterations that occur in the brains of people who chronically use opioids and who are diagnosed with OUD remains limited.
To address this issue, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have conducted the largest transcriptomic (the study of all the RNA molecules within a cell) study to date using postmortem ...
2021-06-14
People with end-stage renal disease often undergo hemodialysis, a life-sustaining blood-filtering treatment. To make the process as fast and efficient as possible, many people have "hemodialysis grafts" surgically implanted. These grafts are like bypasses, connecting a vein to a major artery, making it easier to access blood and ensuring the same blood doesn't get filtered twice.
But the grafts have a notorious problem: Clots tend to form where the graft is attached to the vein. For the person undergoing dialysis, this means not only a break from treatment, but also surgery to remove the graft and then surgery to implant another.
A multidisciplinary team from Washington University School of Medicine ...
2021-06-14
Scientists know that developing cells in a healthy embryo will transform into a variety of cell types that will make up the different organ systems in the human body, a process known as cell differentiation. But they don't know how the cells do it.
A Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) study in Cell Reports led by Stephen Duncan, D.Phil., examines how an endodermal cell - a type of developing cell - becomes a liver cell and not some other type of cell. Duncan and his team found that the development of naive cells into differentiated liver cells ...
2021-06-14
Researchers have developed a new approach to gene therapy that leans on the common pain reliever acetaminophen to force a variety of genetic diseases into remission.
A paper published in Science Translational Medicine describes how the novel technique successfully treated the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia and the debilitating metabolic disease known as phenylketonuria, or PKU, in mice.
The approach uses a benign lentivirus to both correct disease-causing mutations and to insert a new gene that makes liver cells immune to the potentially toxic effects of acetaminophen. The latter ...
2021-06-14
CINCINNATI--The disease is so rare and complex that its acronym is hard to pronounce. But for infants unlucky enough to be born with this lung disease, the outcome is usually fatal.
The disease is called alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of the pulmonary veins (ACDMPV). Research indicates the disease is linked to mutations in the FOXF1 gene. Worldwide, medical experts have documented about 200 cases, but an unknown number of infants may have died without the condition ever being diagnosed, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.
The disease is caused by genetic variations that prevent proper blood vessel formation in the lungs. Within ...
2021-06-14
Los Alamos, N.M., June 10, 2021 - For the first time, the boundary of the heliosphere has been mapped, giving scientists a better understanding of how solar and interstellar winds interact.
Video link: https://youtu.be/w__vzNXSFoI
"Physics models have theorized this boundary for years," said Dan Reisenfeld, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on the paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal today. "But this is the first time we've actually been able to measure it and make a three-dimensional map of it."
The heliosphere is a bubble created by the solar wind, a stream ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] New model identifies levers for stability for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit