FEDS Paper: Do Banks Price Flood Risk in Mortgage Origination: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in New Orleans
David M. Arseneau and Gazi I. KaraThis paper uses a large-scale redrawing of flood zone maps for the City of New Orleans in 2016 to identify how banks respond to changes in perceived flood risk in residential mortgage origination. Using geo-coding, we separate loan-level data on mortgage originations into treatment versus control groups based on how individual properties were affected by the map changes.