Immigrants and Mortgage Delinquency

Real Estate Economics, Forthcoming

Posted: 6 Aug 2014

See all articles by Zhenguo (Len) Lin

Zhenguo (Len) Lin

Florida International University (FIU) - Hollo School of Real Estate

Yingchun Liu

Dept. of Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Law, University of North Texas

Xie Jia

Independent

Date Written: July 23, 2014

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of immigrant status on mortgage delinquency. Due to their different social and economic background, immigrant households may not integrate well into the host society and therefore are more likely to be delinquent on mortgages than otherwise identical native-born households. We test this hypothesis by comparing the mortgage delinquency rate between immigrant and native households in the 2009 PSID data, in which all the immigrant households have been in the U.S. for more than 10 years. We find that after controlling for observables, those relatively recent immigrants who have been in the U.S. for 10 to 20 years have a higher mortgage delinquency rate than natives, while immigrants who have resided in the US for more than 20 years are no different than natives. In addition, there is no evidence that the second generation of immigrants is more likely to be delinquent than the third-or-higher generations. Our results are robust to potential sample selection bias and functional misspecifications.

Keywords: Immigrants; Mortgage delinquency

Suggested Citation

Lin, Zhenguo and Liu, Yingchun and Jia, Xie, Immigrants and Mortgage Delinquency (July 23, 2014). Real Estate Economics, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2476438

Zhenguo Lin (Contact Author)

Florida International University (FIU) - Hollo School of Real Estate ( email )

Miami, FL 33199
United States
3057799248 (Phone)

Yingchun Liu

Dept. of Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Law, University of North Texas ( email )

1155 Union Circle #305340
Denton, TX 76203
United States

Xie Jia

Independent ( email )

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