Market Power in Mortgage Lending and the Transmission of Monetary Policy

Abstract

We present evidence that high concentration in mortgage lending reduces the sensitivity of mortgage rates and refinancing activity to mortgage-backed security (MBS) yields. We isolate the direct effect of concentration and rule out alternative explanations in two ways. First, we use a matching procedure to compare highand low-concentration counties that are very similar on observable characteristics and find similar results. Second, we examine counties where bank mergers increase concentration in mortgage lending. Within a county, sensitivities to MBS yields decrease after a concentration-increasing merger. Our results suggest that the strength of the housing channel of monetary policy transmission varies in both the time series and the cross section. In the cross section, the overall impact of a decline in MBS yields is only 42% as large in a high-concentration county as it is in an average one. In the time series, a decrease in MBS yields today has a 32% smaller effect on the average county than it would have had in the 1990s because of higher concentration today. * This paper was previously circulated under the title “Concentration in Lending, Refinancing Activity, and Mortgage Rates.” We are grateful to Zahi Ben-David, Scott Frame, Andreas Fuster, Ed Golding, Laurie Goodman, Amir Kermani, David Lucca, Karen Pence, Monika Piazzesi, Amit Seru, Jeremy Stein, Amir Sufi, and seminar participants at Berkeley, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Board, Harvard University, the NBER Corporate Finance Spring Meetings, Ohio State, Stanford, Texas, the UCLA/FRB-San Francisco Conference on Housing and the Macroeconomy, and the Urban Institute for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Freddie Mac for data and Toomas Laarits for excellent research assistance. We also thank the Harvard Business School Division of Research for financial support. USC FBE FINANCE SEMINAR presented by David Scharfstein FRIDAY, Oct. 31, 2014 10:30 am – 12:00 pm, Room: JKP-102