The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion

Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, Francesco Trebbi

NBER Working Paper No. 16107
Issued in June 2010
NBER Program(s):Political Economy

We examine how special interests, measured by campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, and constituent interests, measured by the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district, may have influenced U.S. government policy toward the housing sector during the subprime mortgage credit expansion from 2002 to 2007. Beginning in 2002, mortgage industry campaign contributions increasingly targeted U.S. representatives from districts with a large fraction of subprime borrowers. During the expansion years, mortgage industry campaign contributions and the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district increasingly predicted congressional voting behavior on housing related legislation. The evidence suggests that both subprime mortgage lenders and subprime mortgage borrowers influenced government policy toward housing finance during the subprime mortgage credit expansion.

A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the November 2010 NBER Digest.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Digest by email.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w16107

Published: Mian, Atif & Sufi, Amir & Trebbi, Francesco, 2013. "The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion," International Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 8(4), pages 373-408, October. citation courtesy of

Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these: