IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jbfina/v47y2014icp147-154.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Home equity lines of credit and the unemployment rate: Have unemployed consumers borrowed themselves into the next financial crisis?

Author

Listed:
  • Michel, Norbert
  • Lajaunie, John P.
  • Lawrence, Shari
  • Fanguy, Ronnie

Abstract

Some economists argue the recent recovery has been so meager because many consumers have lost their main source of income and maxed-out their home-equity borrowings. Further, banks that were able to make consumer loans did so with less security because home prices fell so dramatically. This paper argues that at least part of that recovery story is purely anecdotal and, in fact, incorrect. In spite of the precipitous decline in home prices, the original price increases were so large that many homeowners still have/had adequate equity in their homes to borrow. The paper presents evidence that the average quarterly increase in aggregate home equity line of credit (HELOC) lending after housing prices began their decline is, statistically, no different than the average quarterly increase in HELOC lending before housing prices began their downward trend. The evidence also suggests that increased HELOC lending during the recession is not correlated with higher unemployment.

Suggested Citation

  • Michel, Norbert & Lajaunie, John P. & Lawrence, Shari & Fanguy, Ronnie, 2014. "Home equity lines of credit and the unemployment rate: Have unemployed consumers borrowed themselves into the next financial crisis?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 147-154.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:47:y:2014:i:c:p:147-154
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2014.06.013
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426614002283
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2014.06.013?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Glenn B. Canner & Thomas A. Durkin & Charles A. Luckett, 1998. "Recent developments in home equity lending," Federal Reserve Bulletin, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), vol. 84(Apr), pages 241-251, April.
    2. Alan Greenspan & James Kennedy, 2008. "Sources and uses of equity extracted from homes," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 24(1), pages 120-144, spring.
    3. R. Alton Gilbert & Gregory E. Sierra, 2003. "The financial condition of U.S. banks: how different are community banks?," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 85(Jan), pages 43-56.
    4. Norbert Michel & John Lajaunie & Shari Lawrence, 2011. "The empirical relationship between home equity borrowing and durable goods purchases," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(21), pages 1561-1570.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. James Conklin & Kristopher Gerardi & Lauren Lambie-Hanson, 2022. "Can Everyone Tap Into the Housing Piggy Bank? Racial Disparities in Access to Home Equity," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2022-17, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    2. Michael LaCour-Little & Wei Yu & Libo Sun, 2014. "The Role of Home Equity Lending in the Recent Mortgage Crisis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 42(1), pages 153-189, March.
    3. Rocheteau, Guillaume & Wright, Randall, 2013. "Liquidity and asset-market dynamics," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 275-294.
    4. Agarwal, Sumit & Ambrose, Brent W. & Chomsisengphet, Souphala & Liu, Chunlin, 2006. "An empirical analysis of home equity loan and line performance," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 444-469, October.
    5. Jiaqian Chen & Daria Finocchiaro & Jesper Linde & Karl Walentin, 2023. "The costs of macroprudential deleveraging in a liquidity trap"," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 51, pages 991-1011, December.
    6. Vivien Burrows, 2018. "The Impact of House Prices on Consumption in the UK: a New Perspective," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 85(337), pages 92-123, January.
    7. Blasko, Matej & Sinkey, Joseph Jr., 2006. "Bank asset structure, real-estate lending, and risk-taking," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 53-81, February.
    8. Kyle Chauvin & David Laibson & Johanna Mollerstrom, 2011. "Asset Bubbles and the Cost of Economic Fluctuations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43, pages 233-260, August.
    9. Donghoon Lee & Christopher Mayer & Joseph Tracy, 2012. "A New Look at Second Liens," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and the Financial Crisis, pages 205-234, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Chan, Sewin & Haughwout, Andrew & Tracy, Joseph, 2015. "How Mortgage Finance Affects the Urban Landscape," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 987-1045, Elsevier.
    11. Branch, William A. & Petrosky-Nadeau, Nicolas & Rocheteau, Guillaume, 2016. "Financial frictions, the housing market, and unemployment," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 101-135.
    12. Massimo Coletta & Riccardo De Bonis & Stefano Piermattei, 2019. "Household Debt in OECD Countries: The Role of Supply-Side and Demand-Side Factors," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 143(3), pages 1185-1217, June.
    13. Mats Håkan Wilhelmsson, 2017. "The effect of house prices on business start-ups: A review and analysis using Swedish regional data," REGION, European Regional Science Association, vol. 4, pages 1-16.
    14. Makoto Nakajima & Irina A. Telyukova, 2017. "Reverse Mortgage Loans: A Quantitative Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 72(2), pages 911-950, April.
    15. Dimitri B. Papadimitriou & Greg Hannsgen & Gennaro Zezza, 2007. "The Effects of a Declining Housing Market on the U.S. Economy," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_506, Levy Economics Institute.
    16. Sebastian Barnes & Garry Young, 2003. "The rise in US household debt: assessing its causes and sustainability," Bank of England working papers 206, Bank of England.
    17. Olivier Mesly & David W. Shanafelt & Nicolas Huck, 2021. "Dysfunctional Markets: A Spray of Prey Perspective," Journal of Economic Issues, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(3), pages 797-819, July.
    18. Fligstein, Neil & Goldstein, Adam, 2012. "The Emergence of a Finance Culture in American Households, 1989-2007," Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series qt6vp6p588, Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley.
    19. Duca, John V. & Muellbauer, John & Murphy, Anthony, 2010. "Housing markets and the financial crisis of 2007-2009: Lessons for the future," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 6(4), pages 203-217, December.
    20. Allan Hernández & Alberto Trejos, 2013. "Fiscal Moral Hazard Due to Monetary Integration," Monetaria, Centro de Estudios Monetarios Latinoamericanos, CEMLA, vol. 0(1), pages 63-85, January-j.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Borrowing; Consumer lending; HELOC; Home equity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • E51 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Money Supply; Credit; Money Multipliers

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:47:y:2014:i:c:p:147-154. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jbf .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.