Biography: Lisa Dettling is a Principal Economist in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, where she is part of the team that forecasts the economic effects of fiscal policy (taxes, transfers, and government spending). She is currently on leave from the Board and visiting CCPR this fall. Lisa’s academic research is in labor and public economics, with a focus on domestic policy issues relating to families and household financial well-being. Her work has appeared in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review and the Review of Economic Studies. Lisa obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland in 2013, and B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from The Ohio State University in 2007.

“Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the Baby Boom?”

Abstract: This paper proposes that the adoption of the modern US mortgage (i.e., low down payment, long-term, and fixed-rate)–led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veteran’s Administration (VA) loan insurance programs—set the stage for the mid-twentieth century US baby boom by dramatically raising rates of home ownership for young families. Using newly digitized data on FHA- and VA- backed loan issuance and births by state-year, and a novel instrumental variables strategy that isolates supply-side variation in loan issuance, we find that the FHA/VA mortgage insurance programs led to 3 million additional births from 1935-1957, roughly 10 percent of the excess births in the baby boom. Aggregate effects mask differences by group — we find no effects of FHA/VA lending on births for Black women, consistent with well-documented racial discrimination in these programs. Our results highlight the importance of housing affordability for fertility decisions.