失踪的购房者和租金通胀：利率和抵押贷款承销标准的作用

Missing Home-Buyers andRent Inflation: The Role of Mortgage UnderwritingStandards Alessia De Stefani WP/25/90 IMF Working Papersdescribe research inprogress by the author(s) and are published toelicit comments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are 2025MAY IMF Working Paper Research Department Missing Home-Buyers and Rent Inflation:TheRole of Interest Rates and Mortgage Underwriting Standards Authorized fordistribution byMaria Soledad Martinez Peria IMF Working Papersdescribe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicitcomments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the ABSTRACT:I study how monetary policy interacts with mortgage underwriting standards in shapingtenuredecisions and rental market equilibria. Using property-level data from the American Housing Survey, I showthat the increase in mortgage rates between 2021 and 2023 pushed many potential first-time home-buyersabove FHA mortgage payment-to-income limits, restricting their access to home-ownership. This resulted in Missing Home-Buyers and Rent Inflation:the Role of Interest Rates and Mortgage Alessia De Stefani* May6,2025 Abstract I study how monetary policy interacts with mortgage underwriting standards inshaping tenure decisions and rental market equilibria.Using property-level datafrom the American Housing Survey, I show that the increase in mortgage ratesbetween2021and2023pushed many potential first-time home-buyers above FHAmortgage payment-to-income limits, restricting their access to home-ownership. This JEL Classification: G21; G51; R21 Keywords: Mortgages; Monetary Policy; Rents *International Monetary Fund, Research Department.Alessia De Stefani:adestefani[at]imf[dot]org.I am grateful to Bruno Albuquerque, Marijn Bolhuis, Rui C. Mano, Soledad Martinez Peria, JuliaOtten and Andrea Presbitero for helpful comments and suggestions.The views expressed herein arethose of the author and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its Management. 1.Introduction The post-pandemic tightening cycle has rekindled fears that monetary policy could ex-acerbate home-buying inequality (Bosshardt et al.,2024; Ringo,2024). With prospectivebuyers caught between historically high mortgage rates and soaring property prices (Fig-ure A1), the rate at which US renters transitioned into home-ownership plummeted by25percent on average, between2021and2023(Figure1). Meanwhile, rental prices surged, This paper addresses this gap in the literature. Using property-level data from theAmerican Housing Survey, I find that between2021and2023renters’ propensity totransition into home-ownership declined sharply. This decline was largely due to rising mortgage rates which, by pushing many tenants beyond Federal Housing Administra-tion (FHA) housing payment-to-income underwriting thresholds, reduced their access Methodologically, I proceed in three steps.First, I use information on both renterand owner-occupied properties in the2019-2023waves of the American Housing Survey(AHS), a representative sample of US housing units. Exploiting the panel component ofthe survey, I identify first-time home-buyers (FTHB), or households moving from rent-ing to owning between two periods. The data also contains detailed information on the characteristics of each individual property (e.g.location, size, age, etc.) and of its occu- Combining observed MTI ratios for first-time buyers and imputed (potential) MTIs for renters, I show that there is a significant discontinuity in the probability of switchingfrom renting to buying around an MTI ratio of31.This ratio corresponds to a key underwriting parameter for FHA loans, the ratio of housing expenses to income, alsocalledfront-endratio.3Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that the probability In a second step, I show that rising mortgage rates made the MTI underwritingthreshold a binding constraint for many renter households, an effect which can largelyexplain the drop in the volume of first-time buyers between2021and2023.I followDefusco et al. (2020) and Bosshardt et al. (2024) and employ a non-parametric approach borrowers were subject to2023interest rates, holding loan demand and housing choices constant.4This hypothetical distribution of MTIs for2021homebuyers aims at simulat-ing how the volume of first-time buyers would have looked like in2023absent the con-straints induced by the interaction between pre-existing MTI limits and rising mortgage I find that differences are negligible below the underwriting MTI limit of31, whileabove this threshold the observed distributions drops by29percent relative to the2021counterfactual, accounting for the majority of the drop in volumes observed between thetwo periods. Using2019as a counterfactual year yields qualitatively similar results, asdoes adjusting mortgage volumes for the intensive margin of mortgage demand driven by changes in rates, incomes a