The Arithmetic of Justice: Calculating Restitution for Mortgage Fraud
The Mandatory Victims Restitution Act requires restitution for federal crimes involving property. In particular, the defendant is required to return any property taken, or, if return is impossible, to pay for the victim’s loss, which may be offset by a partial return of the property. In mortgage fraud cases, this usually entails calculating the lender’s loss — an unpaid loan — and offsetting that loss by the value of the collateral for the loan, which the lender recovers. The circuits disagree about how to value the recovered collateral as an offset to restitution: Should its value be determined by its appraised fair market value or, conversely, by its final foreclosure price when the victim-lender sells it? This Note concludes that courts should presumptively use the foreclosure price, except when that price can be shown not to approximate the value at the date of return.
Foreclosure Delay and U.S. Unemployment
Through a purely positive lens, we study and document the growing trend of mortgagors who skip mortgage payments as an extra source of "informal" unemployment insurance during the 2007 recession and the subsequent recovery. In a dynamic model, we capture this behavior by treating both delinquency and foreclosure not as one period events, but rather as protracted and potentially reversible episodes that influence job search behavior and wage acceptance decisions. With a relatively conservative parameterization, we find that the observed foreclosure delays increase the unemployment rate by an additional 1/3%-1/2% and increase the stock of delinquent loans by 8%-12%. When interpreted as an implicit line of credit, those that use their mortgage as “informal" unemployment insurance borrow at a real rate of at least 18%.>
A Quantitative Analysis of the US Housing and Mortgage Markets and the Foreclosure Crisis
The authors construct a quantitative equilibrium model of the housing sector that accounts for the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate, and the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners prior to the recent boom and bust in the housing market. They analyze the key mechanisms that account for these facts, including the preferential tax treatment of housing and inflation. The authors then use the model to gain a deeper understanding of the recent housing and mortgage crisis by studying the consequence of an unanticipated increase in the supply of housing (overbuilding shock). They show that the model can account for the observed decline in house prices and much of the increase in the foreclosure rate if two additional forces are taken into account: (i) the lengthening of the time to complete a foreclosure (during which a defaulter can stay rent-free in his house) and (ii) the tightening of credit constraints in the market for new mortgages.