| Summary: | US homeowning households tend to be less geographically mobile than households that do not own a home. However, it is unknown whether the inducement to move from a legal process that makes foreclosure more likely on the margin can lead households to make beneficial moves even under adverse circumstances. In Household Spatial Effects of Foreclosure Process I link mortgage and foreclosure deeds and property characteristics with residential moves of US households and their neighborhood characteristics. Variation in the foreclosure process used across US states puts observably similar households at greater risk of foreclosure in those that follow a nonjudicial rather than judicial process. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design (RDD), I find that under a nonjudicial foreclosure process, households are more likely to be foreclosed (2 pp), to move out of their home (3 pp), and to undertake more distant moves (2 pp). Induced moves come not only from completed foreclosures but also from short sales. Households experience relatively greater increases in destination relative to origin tract median income ($1,000) and household income rank at age 29 of children who grew up there (0.5 percentile). Together these results suggest that any potential long-term negative effects of foreclosure on households are not driven by adverse changes in neighborhood characteristics. Overdraft and insufficient funds (NSF) fees comprise a majority of all checking account fees. They disproportionately fall on a small share of consumers, who tend to be younger and report lower incomes. Consumers overwhelmingly report overdrafts as mistakes, though a minority prefer they be allowed. The Dynamics of Overdraft Fees and Incidence studies the dynamics of overdraft/NSF fees in confidential supervisory data from several large banks representing over 20 million US checking accounts, observing every transaction over an 18-month period for a random sample of these accounts. Fixed-effects panel regressions recover within-person variation in overdraft/NSF fees as a function of account tenure and other time-varying characteristics. Our estimates imply that, for accounts opted into overdraft coverage, overdraft/NSF fees increase by about 20% over the first year of account ownership. We find no such effect for accounts opted out. We also present novel results on the relationship between within-person variation in overdraft/NSF activity and overdraft limit, linked and unlinked deposit and credit account balances, measures of account activity, and average daily balances. We find evidence of persistence in monthly overdraft/NSF fees even after controlling for account activity
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