2024-09-29-美联储-抵押贷款设计_还款计划和家庭借款（英）_71页_1mb

Summary

This paper examines how the design of mortgage repayment schedules affects household borrowing, using a Swedish policy reform as a natural experiment. The reform, effective June 2016, required borrowers with loan-to-value ratios exceeding 50 percent to make mandatory amortization payments, increasing their initial monthly payments. The analysis exploits this policy discontinuity to study household behavior across different debt levels.

Key findings include:

• Wealthy borrowers responded by reducing their loan-to-value ratios, leading to a 5 percentage point decline in borrowing. This response is not driven by credit constraints, as households had significant borrowing capacity.
• The results suggest households exhibit "NPV neglect," prioritizing low initial payments over higher lifetime interest costs. This behavioral mechanism explains the observed bunching below the threshold.
• Traditional credit-constrained models cannot replicate the behavioral response, indicating that psychological factors like ongoing flow disutility from amortization payments play a major role in borrowing decisions.

The findings have broad implications for mortgage design, consumer borrowing, and macroprudential policy. The study underscores that new mortgage products with delayed repayment schedules could significantly increase household debt and lifetime interest costs due to cognitive biases like NPV neglect. The results highlight the importance of considering behavioral economics in mortgage market analysis and regulatory design.