John Mondragon

CV 

Working Papers

Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth across U.S. Cities (updated July 2025)

with Schuyler Louie and Johannes Wieland 

• FAQ

• Response to Weibe (2025) comment

• Response to Furth (2025) comment

Credit Supply, Prices, and Rationing in the Mortgage Market

Housing Demand and Remote Work (updated May 2025)

with Johannes Wieland

Dynastic Home Equity 

with Matteo Benetton and Marianna Kudlyak 

Household Credit and Employment in the Great Recession 

Revise and resubmit at the Journal of Finance

Publications/Forthcoming

No Job, No Money, No Refi: Frictions to Refinancing in a Recession

with Anthony DeFusco

Journal of Finance

We study how employment documentation requirements and out-of-pocket closing costs constrain mortgage refinancing. These frictions, which bind most severely during recessions, may significantly inhibit monetary policy pass-through. To study their effects on refinancing, we exploit an FHA policy change that excluded unemployed borrowers from refinancing and increased others’ out-of-pocket costs substantially. These changes dramatically reduced refinancing rates, particularly among the likely unemployed and those facing new out-of-pocket costs. Our results imply that unemployed and liquidity-constrained borrowers have a high latent demand for refinancing. Cyclical variation in these factors may therefore affect both the aggregate and distributional consequences of monetary policy.

Regulating Household Leverage 

with Anthony DeFusco and Stephanie Johnson

Review of Economic Studies

This paper studies how credit markets respond to policy constraints on household leverage. Exploiting a sharp policy-induced discontinuity in the cost of originating certain high-leverage mortgages, we study how the Dodd-Frank “Ability-to-Repay” rule affected the price and availability of credit in the U.S. mortgage market. Our estimates show that the policy had only moderate effects on prices, increasing interest rates on affected loans by 10-15 basis points. The effect on quantities, however, was significantly larger; we estimate that the policy eliminated 15 percent of the affected market completely and reduced leverage for another 20 percent of remaining borrowers. This reduction in quantities is much greater than would be implied by plausible demand elasticities and suggests that lenders responded to the policy primarily by rationing credit. Finally, while the policy succeeded in reducing leverage, our estimates suggest this effect would have only slightly reduced aggregate default rates during the housing crisis.

Does Greater Inequality Lead to More Household Borrowing? New Evidence from Household Data

with Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Marianna Kudlyak 

Journal of the European Economic Association

Using household-level debt data over 2000-2012 and local variation in inequality, we show that low-income households in high-inequality regions (zip-codes, counties, states) accumulated less debt relative to their income than low-income households in lower-inequality regions. We also find evidence that low-income households face higher credit prices and reduced access to credit as inequality increases. We argue that these patterns are consistent with inequality tilting credit supply away from low-income households and toward high-income households, which may have long-run implications for outcomes like homeownership or entrepreneurship. 

Measuring Work from Home in the Cross Section  

AEA P&P 2023

Work in Progress

Rate Lock is a Positive Demand Shock 

with  Valeska Fresquet Kohen and Adam Shapiro

The Housing Crisis and the Rise in Student Loans 

with Gene Amromin and Janice Eberly

We study if the changes in U.S. house prices over the 2000s affected growth in student loans. Using household-level panel survey data, we find that as home prices fall households depend less on home equity extraction to finance college enrollment and depend more on student loans. We estimate that for every lost dollar of home equity credit that would have been used to finance college enrollment, households increase student loan debt by forty to sixty cents. This substitution appears to be driven primarily by households with low levels of liquid assets. We extend our analysis with credit bureau data to trace longer-run effects of this leverage on students. Our results show that the decline in house prices reduced households’ ability to finance college enrollment with home equity credit, but that constrained households mostly responded by continuing to enroll in college and relying on student loans. Our estimates suggests the 30% fall in house prices from the 2006 peak resulted in the average college student borrowing an additional $1,300 in student loans, with some evidence of larger effects on liquidity-constrained and less-educated households.