PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Janelle Downing
AU  - Tim Bruckner
TI  - Subprime Babies: The Foreclosure Crisis and Initial Health Endowments
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.2.07
DP  - 2019 Mar 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 123--140
VI  - 5
IP  - 2
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/2/123.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/2/123.full
AB  - The subprime mortgage crisis was a devastating financial shock for many homeowners. This research uses a probabilistic matching strategy to link foreclosure records with birth certificate records from 2006 to 2010 in California to identify birth parents who experienced a foreclosure. Among mothers who did, those issued a loan during the peak of subprime lending from 2005 to 2007 were more Hispanic and socioeconomically disadvantaged than mothers with loans originating before 2005. We use a mother fixed-effects analyses of ever-foreclosed mothers issued a loan during 2006 and 2007 and find that infants in gestation during or after the foreclosure had a lower birth weight for gestational age than those born earlier, suggesting that the foreclosure crisis was a plausible contributor to disparities in initial health endowments.