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Mortgage markets differ across countries in terms of size, institutional and legal structures, and the extent and modality of government intervention. This chapter begins by briefly reviewing international comparative studies of mortgage markets. It then provides an overview of mortgage finance systems and describes the key features of mortgage markets of 21 countries. Next, the chapter offers an empirical analysis of mortgage markets using a data set comprising a maximum number of countries for which reliable data are available. It also characterizes ideal housing finance systems and presents a taxonomy of countries based on a set of criteria. The last section summarizes the main findings and provides suggestions on future research.

This chapter traces the rapid evolution of mortgage financing from boom to bust and explores two crucial questions surrounding the market's rise and fall. First, why did the lending boom occur in the size and form that it did? Second, why has the foreclosure crisis been both cataclysmic and heterogeneous across geography and loan types? The chapter is organized as follows. Section 4.2 presents a broad set of descriptive statistics and facts regarding the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market. Section 4.3 addresses the question of why there was a lending boom of this sort. Section 4.4 discusses the “prolonged” foreclosure crisis that prompted a number of policy responses by the government. The chapter concludes with broad perspective on the future of mortgage finance and lessons learned from the last tumultuous decade.

This chapter examines the process of transplanting American housing institutions to Russia through three stages: privatization, establishment of mortgage finance, and the government's attempts to rescue the market from failure. After the collapse of Soviet rule, the new government tried to construct a housing market via the Housing Sector Reform Project (HSRP). The Yeltsin administration and its American advisers had three goals: to reduce the state's role in the housing sector, to enable markets to allocate housing according to resources and preferences, and to convince the public that housing markets are efficient and fair. This chapter first provides an overview of the Russian government's attempts to transplant the housing market during the period 1992–1998 before analyzing why the market failed in the next five years. It then discusses the emergence of the mortgage market in 2005–2009, with particular emphasis on mortgage subsidies and mortgage lending. It also considers the tension between state and market in Russian housing policy and concludes by assessing the consequences of the market failure for Russian housing.

In Chapter 7, fiscal and monetary policies are considered and particular attention is paid to structural changes in mortgage finance markets. From the early 1980s the UK experienced two periods of strong mortgage growth: the first lasted until the recession of the early 1990s and the second started in the mid-1990s and ended with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, a distinguishing feature of the GFC period was the fall in mortgage advances, which has never been fully reversed. Credit tightening causes particular problems for first-time buyers as compared to the majority of current owners; the latter typically have sufficient equity in their existing properties, which they can use to finance further purchases. Therefore, the decline in credit availability has had important distributional effects. Accumulated equity also provides an advantage for existing owners entering the expanded Buy to Let market. Similarly, the stress tests that borrowers now have to undertake fall primarily on aspiring first-time buyers and those with volatile incomes. The chapter also considers non-neutralities in the property tax system which can discriminate against first-time buyers.

In 1924, country bankers in Texas and Iowa founded tax clubs to petition for the so-called Mellon Plan for lower taxes on the rich. This chapter traces the tax club movement to the efforts of James Asbury Arnold, an organizer who took the skills he acquired from agrarian radicals in the Texas Farmers’ Union and put them to work to lobby for lower taxes on the rich. It shows that the movement caught on among country bankers who saw these tax cuts as a way to keep federally subsidized competitors out of their industry. The tax club activists hoped cutting taxes on the rich would eliminate the appeal of tax-exempt bonds—and thereby dry up their competitors’ funding stream. The tax clubs ultimately swayed key Congressional votes and brought about the largest cut in the top tax rate in American history in the Revenue Act of 1926.

This chapter explores the housing bubble phenomenon that led to the economic recession in the United States from 2007 to 2009. The first phase, from 2001 to 2004, was characterized by the availability of mortgage financing for home ownership facilitated by the lowering of overnight interbank borrowing costs (2001–2004) and the Congress-approved tax cuts (2001–2003). These initiatives were extended even more in the second phase, lasting until the end of 2007, when low mortgage rates encouraged Americans to take on massive mortgages for home ownership. People borrowed beyond their means in order to purchase properties with inflated values. Widespread borrowing ultimately led to financial crisis, which was completely felt at the turn of 2007. The chapter also discusses the rescue deals initiated in 2008.

Home ownership rose dramatically in the United States during the mid-20th century. This chapter discusses what is known about the causes of this increase and highlights areas needing more research. Past work has investigated factors such as rising real incomes, individuals leaving home at younger ages, favorable tax treatment for those who owned their own houses, and the rise of the modern mortgage finance system. No single explanation fully accounts for the rise in homeownership on its own, but several of these explanations appear to be quantitatively important, and the chapter discusses ways in which they are interrelated. Also discussed are a number of other contributing factors, such as the expansion of suburban neighborhoods associated with the construction of highways and the exodus of white families from city centers.

This chapter provides an overview of policy strategies intended to curb, or balance financial and social aspects of homeownership and park life with the structure and profitability of the mobile-home industrial complex. Strategies at the federal, state and local levels are considered.

By the early nineteenth century, while the form of legal transactions was cumbersome, the substance of the law of property had been settled by conveyancers and judges. As far as land was concerned, all that remained for the courts to solve were certain problems of urban servitudes and business mortgage financing. Parliament, on the other hand, having done very little in the law of private property since the Restoration, became extremely active. ‘Free trade in land’ was the battle-cry of those whose aim was to strike off the fetters binding land to its owner by increasing the powers, and lowering the cost, of alienation. This chapter however, considers matters from the point of view of the New River and gives only an impression of the whole story. A starting point is selected, and the most appropriate seems to be the year of the repeal of the Bubble Act.