Did Mortgage Rate Locks Lead to Rising House Prices?

While rising interest rates usually have a negative impact on home prices, between 2021 and 2023, when interest rates increased by almost four percentage points, house prices rose 17 percent, relative to rents. Meyer Fellow and PhD candidate Justin Katz will discuss research he did with Robert Minton exploring whether homeowners locked into below-market, fixed-rate mortgages chose not to move to avoid higher borrowing costs, and to what extent this may have contributed to the sharp rise in home prices.