Analysis of Housing Finance Issues Using the
American Housing Survey (AHS) (February 2004, 186 p.)
The American Housing Survey (AHS, formerly Annual Housing Survey) is the most
comprehensive source of information about the characteristics
and condition of the nation’s housing stock. Started
in 1973, the AHS national sample data were collected by the
U.S. Census Bureau for the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) on a nationally representative sample of
housing units every year until 1981, and they have been collected
every other year since then. Over the years, AHS data have
been used extensively by researchers and policy analysts to
answer questions about the nation’s housing conditions
and occupant characteristics. The longitudinal nature of the
AHS also permits the analysis of dynamic changes in housing
and occupancy characteristics of the housing stock.
The AHS data contain detailed questions about mortgages asked
of respondents for owner-occupied units in the survey. The
questions cover most basic mortgage and housing finance topics.
This wealth of mortgage-related variables, combined with the
occupant demographic and property location information, could
be a very powerful resource for answering many housing finance
research and policy questions. These micro-data have the potential
to provide crucial information to support analysis of issues
of interest to policy makers and the mortgage industry. The
principal advantage of using the AHS for mortgage market and
housing finance analysis is its detailed household, housing,
loan, and geographic characteristics. In addition to use in
detailed cross tabulations, these variables can also be used
as micro data to conduct multiple regressions on the cross-sectional
files and other loan-level statistical analyses on the longitudinal
panels.
However, neither the housing research community nor HUD
staff has made as much use of the mortgage variables of the
AHS data as might be expected. Among the reasons for this
underutilization is the fact that the reliability of these
mortgage-related variables in the AHS has not been verified.
Analysis is needed to establish the extent to which limitations
associated with sample size, survey design, and interview
response affect the accuracy and consistency of the mortgage
data in the AHS. The research presented in this study is intended
to meet this need. The goals of the analysis are to determine:
1) what types of mortgage market analysis can be supported
by the AHS; 2) what areas of the AHS are problematic for mortgage
research; and 3) what analysis techniques or changes in the
survey could potentially compensate for the problems.
The analysis of the reliability of the AHS is composed of
two broad categories. First, to test the reliability of the
AHS variables we replicate measures of mortgage activity from
other reliable sources of data that serve as benchmarks for
the AHS estimates. This analysis is referred to as the “replication
analysis.” Second, we use the longitudinal nature of
the AHS to determine whether answers to questions on mortgages
are consistent and stable over time. Findings from each of
these analyses are presented in turn below. The study concludes
with recommendations for the topics for which the AHS can
reliably be used, subjects that are problematic given the
nature of the AHS data, areas where further investigation
is needed to explore the potential usefulness of the AHS,
and options for improving the quality of the mortgage-related
variables in the survey instrument.
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