No Job, No Money, No Refi: Frictions to Refinancing in a Recession

Corresponding Author

ANTHONY A. DEFUSCO

• anthony.defusco@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Correspondence: Anthony DeFusco, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2211 Campus Drive, Office 4463, Evanston, IL 60208; e-mail: anthony.defusco@kellogg.northwestern.edu.

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JOHN MONDRAGON

Anthony A. DeFusco and John Mondragon are with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We thank seminar participants at the Bank of England, BYU, the Central Bank of Ireland, Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU, HUD, ITAM, LSE, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; as well as conference participants at the NBER Monetary Economics meeting, SITE Financial Regulation session, NYU Household Finance Conference, SED, the New York Fed Conference on Developments in Empirical Macroeconomics, the University of Washington Summer Finance Conference, the Texas Finance Festival, the Pre-WFA Real Estate Conference, the UW Madison Conference on Real Estate, and the AREUEA National Conference, for comments and suggestions. We are especially grateful to our discussants Hamilton Fout, Andra Ghent, Tim McQuade, and Wenlen Qian. Finally, we would like to thank Brent Ambrose, George Baker, and Brian Chappelle for very helpful conversations regarding institutional details of the FHA and the Streamline Refinance Program. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Guthrie Center for Real Estate Research at Northwestern University. Both authors have read The Journal of Finance disclosure policy and have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

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