By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 13, 2015
The website “538” has one claim to fame – interpreting data. In the mortgage fraud context it got this horribly wrong in a way that should be an object lesson to the dangers of implicit assumptions that implicitly exclude alternative theories of causation. This typically happens because of an unrecognized bias. Ben Casselman and Andrew Flowers provided the object lesson in their discussion of a new study (behind a pay wall) by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi entitled “Fraudulent Income Overstatement on Mortgage Applications during the Credit Expansion of 2002 to 2005”
“What they found: Mortgage lending surged in low-income, less creditworthy areas of the U.S. between 2002 and 2005. But systemic differences between incomes reported on mortgage applications and incomes reported to the IRS indicate that much of this “subprime” lending was reliant on borrowers fraudulently overstating their income.
Why it matters: Between 2002 and 2005, there was a tsunami of money for prospective U.S. homebuyers. This surge of mortgage credit was strongest in less creditworthy, low-income areas. But some economists have argued that incomes of homebuyers were increasing in these areas. After all, by looking at income as reported on mortgage applications, the areas with lower credit scores seem to have robust growth of homebuyers’ income. But new research from Sufi and Mian — the authors of “House of Debt” who have written for FiveThirtyEight — confirms that, no, economic improvement wasn’t behind these improving income numbers. It was fraud. Specifically, the fraud of homebuyers overstating income.”
