Rawley Z. Heimer
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Research › Mortgage lending and housing

Mortgage lending and housing

Who gets mortgage credit and on what terms, including tests for disparate treatment in lending, the politics of fair-lending enforcement, and the role of institutional investors in single-family housing.

Related terms: fair lending, disparate treatment, racial disparities in mortgage approvals, loan officers, Community Reinvestment Act, single-family rentals, institutional investors, homeownership.

Published papers

  1. Politicizing Consumer Credit

    With Pat Akey and Stefan Lewellen. Journal of Financial Economics.

    When a state’s senator becomes a powerful committee chair, credit access in the state’s minority neighborhoods falls by 7.5%.

Working papers

  1. Temporal Focal Points and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from U.S. Mortgage Lending

    With Marco Giacoletti and Edison Yu. Working paper.

    Loan officers’ month-end volume quotas account for at least half of the unexplained racial gap in mortgage approvals, pointing to lender behavior.

  2. Single-Family REITs and Local Housing Markets

    With Marco Giacoletti, Wenli Li, and Edison Yu. Working paper.

    Single-family REITs buy homes in neighborhoods ringing city centers, and their growth shows little evidence of harming local housing markets.

  3. Borrowing Young, Paying Later

    With Allison Cole and Igor Livshits. Draft available on request.

    The Credit CARD Act’s limits on cards for people under 21 raised credit scores and homeownership by age 30 but increased mortgage delinquency.

Guides and policy writing

  1. Intergenerational Homeownership and Mortgage Distress

    With Nicholas Fritsch. Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

    Parents’ mortgage distress during the 2008 crisis is associated with a lower chance that their children buy a home.

Other research topics