Working Paper
Not Cashing In on Cashing Out: An Analysis of Low Cash-Out Refinance Rates
WP 26-01 – More than half of borrowers who have both home equity and high-interest loans fail to reduce their overall debt burden by folding this high-interest debt into a lower-interest mortgage when they undertake a mortgage refinance.
Featured Work
Working Paper
Property Tax Pass-Through to Renters: A Quasi-Experimental Approach
WP 25-41 – Does a landlord’s property tax bill affect a new tenant’s rent? According to standard economic theory, it should not — the law of one price implies that identical rental units in the same market should be priced identically, despite heterogeneity in property tax costs.
Working Paper
What Is My Home Worth?
WP 25-40 – Economic models often assume that agents always know the market value of their assets. We use residential property tax assessment as a laboratory to test this assumption for housing. We first show that assessed market value (AMV) is a noisy proxy for transaction-based market value (TMV).
Working Paper
Gender Differences in Credit Card Limits: Evidence from Sole Mortgage Applicants
WP 23-30/R – Using linked mortgage application and credit bureau data, we document the existence of unconditional and conditional gender gaps in the distribution of total credit card limits for sole mortgage applicants
Featured Data
CFI COVID-19 Survey of Consumers
To gain insights into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial security in the U.S., the Consumer Finance Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conducted a series of national surveys of consumers beginning in April 2020 and concluding in April 2022.
Updated: 30 May ’23
Philadelphia’s History of Racially Restricted Housing
As part of the Philadelphia Fed’s efforts to understand how housing affects the economy in our District, our researchers are studying the links between past housing discrimination and present-day outcomes.
Updated: 20 Feb ’24