Collaborative Research - Institutional Performance and Change during Boom and Bust: The Residential Mortgage Market, 1920-1940

合作研究 - 繁荣与萧条期间的机构绩效和变化：住宅抵押贷款市场，1920-1940 年

• 批准号: 1062079
• 负责人: Price Fishback
• 金额: $ 30.43万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-05-15 至 2015-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1062079&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Institutional; Performance; Change

PROJECT ABSTRACTInstitutional Performance and Change during Boom and Bust: The Residential Mortgage Market, 1920-1940The residential mortgage crisis that began in 2007 is more severe, in terms of rates of foreclosure and decreases in home prices and residential wealth, than any since the 1930s. The building and mortgage boom of the 1920s and bust of the 1930s, as a result, provide striking historical benchmarks against which to measure our own experience. History can play a much more important role, however, because it offers the opportunity to investigate three issues that are of great importance and relevance as we struggle through our own mortgage crisis: 1. We need to examine why the collapse in residential housing markets during the 1930s was so severe, and the recovery from it so uneven, in order to better understand how disruptions to the mortgage market contributed to the depth and duration of the Great Depression. These issues are relevant today because the volume of mortgage lending grew rapidly during the 1920s just as it did before the current crisis; because rapid innovation transformed mortgage loan contracts and funding channels in the lead-up to both episodes; and because both crises were marked by widespread disruption in mortgage lending channels. 2. We need to assess whether federal emergency responses were effective in ameliorating the impacts of the 1930s mortgage crisis. These New Deal interventions were extraordinary in size and scope, but similar to recent policies in that they encouraged widespread mortgage loan modification. Examining the emergency policies of the 1930s, as a result, can help us better understand how responses during the current crisis have succeeded and fallen short.3. We need to examine the performance of the mortgage market before, during and after the institutional structure of the nation?s mortgage market was permanently reshaped between 1932 and 1938 by the creation of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, the modern Saving & Loans industry, the FHA home mortgage loan insurance program, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the introduction of the long-term, amortized, low-down payment mortgage loan. These institutions continue to form the basic framework of the modern mortgage market and understanding their origins will provide important guidance as we reshape them once again.All three issues deserve close investigation, but discussion of financial crises during the Great Depression has for decades been focused almost exclusively on the banking system and the stock market. This project is designed to rectify that oversight by stimulating for the first time a serious examination of the issues enumerated above. It does so in two steps. First, the core of the proposal is to create a publicly available, high-quality data base of institution-level mortgage lending activity that will allow scholars to investigate the operation of local and regional mortgage markets between 1920 and 1940. Second, the co-PIs will use the data base as it is being assembled to investigate several of the topics enumerated above in order to stimulate a broad discussion of this important historical episode.The importance of the data collection component of the project is easy to understand?research in economics is drawn to issues that can be investigated with readily available, high-quality data. Such data exist for the residential mortgage market before 1940, but the information is spread out in thousands of printed volumes held that are held in public and university archives. The data sit in this form because the dominant institutional mortgage lenders before 1940 were non-bank, state-chartered institutions such as Building & Loan Associations, Mutual Savings Banks and Life Insurance companies. The activities of these institutions were well-documented in annual reports of state regulatory authorities, but this information needs to collected, digitized and organized into a reliable and widely available data set. Most of the funding for this project will support photographing and digitizing the state-level reports; preparing extensive documentation so that these data can be easily used; and combining the institutional balance sheet data with neighborhood, city, and state level information on housing markets, economic activity and a broad range of demographic information. The data collection and assembly will take three years to complete and the collaborative structure of this project has been driven by its size and complexity.The co-PIs were drawn to this project after independently using federally-generated, county-level data to investigate one of the largest and most dramatic of the federal policy interventions of the 1930s?the Home Owners? Loan Corporation. The HOLC modified distressed mortgages on one-tenth of the nation?s owner-occupied homes between 1934 and 1936 and the work of the co-PIs have shown that this activity cushioned homeownership rates and home prices during the 1930s, but did not stimulate new home construction. In the course of these investigations the co-PIs became convinced that much more can be learned about HOLC?and FHA insurance, Fannie Mae discounting and FHLB supervision?if institution-level data were available to complement the county-level data they have already collected on mortgage and housing markets. The second phase of the project, therefore, will be a series of solo- and joint-authored empirical investigations by the co-PIs using the assembled data base. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (in This Time is Different) have recently shown that the historical perspective can inform us about severe economic crises and shape our responses to them. It is unfortunate, in contrast, that we have yet to closely examine the mortgage crisis of the 1930s or to fully appreciate its hard-earned lessons. The goal of this project is to facilitate that discussion so that history can assist as we struggle to move through and beyond our own mortgage crisis.

项目摘要繁荣与萧条期间的制度表现和变化：住宅抵押贷款市场，1920-1940 从止赎率、房价和住宅财富下降的角度来看，2007 年开始的住宅抵押贷款危机比 1930 年代以来的任何一次危机都要严重。 因此，20 年代的建筑和抵押贷款繁荣和 1930 年代的萧条提供了惊人的历史基准来衡量我们自己的经验。 然而，历史可以发挥更重要的作用，因为它提供了研究三个问题的机会，这些问题在我们应对抵押贷款危机时非常重要和相关： 1. 我们需要研究为什么住宅市场在为了更好地了解抵押贷款市场的混乱如何导致大萧条的深度和持续时间，我们对 20 世纪 30 年代的形势如此严峻，而且复苏如此不平衡。这些问题在今天仍然具有现实意义，因为抵押贷款的数量在 20 年代迅速增长，就像当前危机之前一样；因为在这两个事件发生之前，快速的创新改变了抵押贷款合同和融资渠道；而且因为这两次危机的特点是抵押贷款渠道普遍受到破坏。 2. 我们需要评估联邦紧急应对措施是否有效缓解 20 世纪 30 年代抵押贷款危机的影响。这些新政干预措施的规模和范围都非同寻常，但与最近的政策相似，它们鼓励广泛的抵押贷款修改。因此，审视 20 世纪 30 年代的紧急政策，可以帮助我们更好地了解当前危机期间的应对措施是如何成功和失败的。3。我们需要考察 1932 年至 1938 年间美国抵押贷款市场的制度结构因联邦住房贷款银行系统、现代储蓄和贷款行业的创建而永久重塑之前、期间和之后抵押贷款市场的表现。 FHA 住房抵押贷款保险计划、联邦国民抵押贷款协会 (Fannie Mae) 以及长期、摊销、低首付抵押贷款的推出。这些机构继续构成了现代抵押贷款市场的基本框架，了解它们的起源将为我们再次重塑它们提供重要指导。这三个问题都值得仔细研究，但几十年来，对大萧条期间金融危机的讨论几乎一直集中在专门针对银行系统和股票市场。该项目旨在通过首次对上述问题进行认真审查来纠正这种监督。 它分两步完成。 首先，该提案的核心是创建一个公开的、高质量的机构级抵押贷款活动数据库，使学者能够调查 1920 年至 1940 年间本地和区域抵押贷款市场的运作情况。 PI 将使用正在组装的数据库来调查上面列举的几个主题，以激发对这一重要历史事件的广泛讨论。该项目数据收集部分的重要性很容易理解？经济学研究被问题所吸引可以使用现成的高质量数据进行调查。 1940 年之前住宅抵押贷款市场的此类数据已存在，但这些信息分散在公共和大学档案馆保存的数千本印刷卷中。数据之所以采用这种形式，是因为 1940 年之前占主导地位的机构抵押贷款机构是非银行、国家特许机构，例如建筑贷款协会、互助储蓄银行和人寿保险公司。 这些机构的活动在国家监管机构的年度报告中有详细记录，但这些信息需要收集、数字化并组织成可靠且广泛可用的数据集。 该项目的大部分资金将用于支持州级报告的拍摄和数字化；准备大量的文档，以便可以轻松使用这些数据；将机构资产负债表数据与社区、城市和州层面的住房市场、经济活动和广泛的人口信息相结合。 数据收集和组装将需要三年时间才能完成，该项目的协作结构是由其规模和复杂性决定的。联合 PI 在独立使用联邦生成的县级数据来调查一个项目后被吸引到该项目中。 20 世纪 30 年代规模最大、最具戏剧性的联邦政策干预措施之一是“房主”？贷款公司。 HOLC 在 1934 年至 1936 年间修改了全国十分之一的自住房屋的不良抵押贷款，共同 PI 的工作表明，这项活动缓冲了 1930 年代的房屋拥有率和房价，但并没有刺激新的住房抵押贷款。住宅建设。在这些调查过程中，联合 PI 确信，如果能够提供机构级数据来补充他们已经收集的县级数据，那么可以对 HOLC 和 FHA 保险、房利美贴现和 FHLB 监管了解更多。关于抵押贷款和住房市场。 因此，该项目的第二阶段将是由联合 PI 使用组装的数据库进行一系列单独和联合撰写的实证研究。 卡门·莱因哈特 (Carmen Reinhart) 和肯尼思·罗格夫 (Kenneth Rogoff)（《这次不一样》）最近表明，历史视角可以让我们了解严重的经济危机，并塑造我们的应对措施。 不幸的是，相比之下，我们还没有仔细审视 20 世纪 30 年代的抵押贷款危机，也没有充分认识到它来之不易的教训。 该项目的目标是促进这种讨论，以便历史能够在我们努力度过并超越我们自己的抵押贷款危机时提供帮助。