Christopher L. Foote

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine more than 100,000 homeowners in Massachusetts who had negative equity during the early 1990s and find that fewer than 10 percent of these owners eventually lost their home to foreclosure.

TL;DR: This article developed a simple theoretical model to interpret these empirical findings and to assess potential foreclosure-reduction policies, which implies that lenders and policymakers face an information problem in trying to help borrowers with negative equity, because it is hard to determine which owners really need help in order to stay in their homes.

TL;DR: This article used an economic model to focus on two key decisions: the borrower's choice to default on a mortgage and the lender's subsequent choice whether to renegotiate or modify the loan, and provided theoretical results and empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that the efficiency of foreclosure for investors is a more plausible explanation for the low number of modifications to date than contract frictions related to securitization agreements between servicers and investors.

TL;DR: The authors studied the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards and found a large secular decline in the cross sectional dispersion of firm growth rates and in the average magnitude of firm level volatility.

TL;DR: The authors argue that neither institutional features of the mortgage market nor financial innovations are any more likely to explain those distorted beliefs than they are to explain the Dutch tulip bubble 400 years ago.