Working Paper Series Congressional Budget Office Washington, DC Do Large-Scale Refinancing Programs Reduce Mortgage Defaults? Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity Design∗ Gabriel Ehrlich University of Michigan Formerly an employee of the Congressional Budget Office
[email protected] Jeffrey Perry Congressional Budget Office
[email protected] October 2015 Working Paper 2015-06 To enhance the transparency of the work of the Congressional Budget Office and to encourage external review of that work, CBO’s working paper series includes papers that provide technical descriptions of official CBO analyses as well as papers that represent independent research by CBO analysts. Working papers are not subject to CBO’s regular review and editing process. Papers in this series are available at http://go.usa.gov/ULE. ∗We thank Shawn Jones, Jeffrey Kling, Doug McManus, Damien Moore, Mitchell Remy, Robert Shimer, David Torregrosa, and Joseph Tracy, as well as seminar participants at the American Enter- prise Institute, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Department of Housing and Ur- ban Development, University of Michigan, and University of Richmond, for helpful comments. We also thank Charles Capone and Alex Sonu for their help with the data used in this paper. Finally, we thank Gabe Waggoner for editorial assistance. The views expressed here should not be interpreted as CBO’s. Abstract In 2012, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) reduced fees to refinance FHA- insured mortgages obtained before—but not after—a retroactive deadline. We use a natural experiment to study how reduced mortgage payments affect default rates.