As the role of mortgage brokers in mortgage origination grew from insignificant in the 1980s to dominant in recent years, questions have arisen about whether its services help or harm consumers. In response, states have increasingly regulated the business, largely by creating and tightening occupational licensing requirements for mortgage brokers. The question of whether increased occupational licensing of mortgage brokers improves consumer outcomes is theoretically ambiguous and has been little studied empirically. This study introduces a new database of mortgage broker licensing requirements and assesses the relationships between these requirements and outcomes in both the labor market for brokers and the consumer market for mortgages. We find that one typical regulation—the requirement in many states that mortgage brokers maintain a surety bond or minimum net worth—has a significant and fairly consistent statistical relationship with both labor and consumer market outcomes. In particular, we find that tighter bonding/net worth requirements are associated with slightly higher broker earnings, fewer brokers, fewer subprime mortgages, higher foreclosure rates, and a greater percentage of high-interest-rate mortgages. Although we do not provide a full causal interpretation of these results, we take seriously the possibility that restrictive bonding requirements for mortgage brokers have unintended negative consequences for many consumers. On balance, our results also seem to support the relevance of theories of occupational licensing that stress the importance of financial entry and exit barriers.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13684.
Length: Date of creation: Dec 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13684
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Find related papers by JEL classification: H77 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - Intergovernmental Relations; Federalism J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy J4 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets J44 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Professional Labor Markets and Occupations J8 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Standards K2 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law K31 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Labor Law L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure L38 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Public Policy L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation L84 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Personal, Professional, and Business Services
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