FHA First‑Time Buyer Homeownership Sustainability: An Update
An important part of the mission of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is to provide affordable mortgages that both promote the transition from renting to owning and create “sustainable” homeownership. The FHA has never defined what it means by sustainability. However, we developed a scorecard in 2018 that tracks the long-term outcomes of FHA first-time buyers (FTBs) and update it again in this post. The data show that from 2011 to 2016 roughly
21.8 percent of FHA FTBs failed to sustain their homeownership.
Three Key Facts from the Center for Microeconomic Data’s 2022 Student Loan Update
Today, researchers from the Center for Microeconomic Data released the 2022 Student Loan Update, which contains statistics summarizing who holds student loans along with characteristics of these balances. To compute these statistics, we use the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a nationally representative 5 percent sample of all U.S. adults with an Equifax credit report. For this update, we focus on individuals with a student loan on their credit report. The update is linked here and shared in the student debt section of the Center for Microeconomic Data’s website. In this post, we highlight three facts from the current student loan landscape.
Consumer Scores and Price Discrimination
Most American consumers likely are familiar with credit scores, as every lender in the United States uses them to evaluate credit risk. But the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that many firms use to target ads, prices, products, and service levels to individual consumers may be less familiar, or the Affluence Index that ranks households according to their spending power. These are just a few among a plethora of scores that have emerged recently, consequence of the abundant consumer data that can be gathered online. Such consumer scores use data on age, ethnicity, gender, household income, zip code, and purchases as inputs to create numbers that proxy for consumer characteristics or behaviors that are of interest to firms. Unlike traditional credit scores, however, these scores are not available to consumers. Can a consumer benefit from data collection even if the ensuing scores are eventually used “against” her, for instance, by enabling firms to set individualized prices? Would it help her to know her score? And how would firms try to counteract the consumer’s response?