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Did Affordable Housing Legislation Contribute to the Subprime Securities Boom?
No. In this paper we use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced origination or affected prices of subprime mort- gages. We use merged loan-level data on non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data for California and Florida. We find no evidence that lenders increased subprime originations or altered pricing around the discrete eligibil- ity cutoffs for the Government Sponsored Enterprises' (GSEs) affordable housing goals or the Community Reinvestment Act. Although the GSEs may have played a role in the crisis, our results indicate that it was not due to their affordable housing mandates.
