Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/51949 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5895
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for hardship letter from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such searches locate documents which assist to write a successful loan modification request. Other relevant searches for short sale, REO (as in Real Estate Owned) or FHA (as in Federal Housing Administration) are used to provide a comprehensive view of the housing market. Using data from the great recession and benchmarking them against data from the labor market, the paper demonstrates that internet activity captures socioeconomic phenomena in real time very well, with no interviewer effect at a high frequency. This suggests that the new data base should spur new housing research.
Subjects: 
housing
hardship letter
loan delinquency
mortgage
National Delinquency Survey (NDS)
financial crisis
recession
bubble
Google Insights
JEL: 
C81
E65
G21
R31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
338.69 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.