Historical Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Data

Historical Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Data FilesThe Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) is a near census of mortgage lending activity in the United States implemented by the Federal Reserve Board's Regulation C. Under HMDA, financial institutions are required to submit detailed records on loan applications and their ultimate outcomes, viz. origination, denial, application withdrawal, etc. HMDA forms the backbone of analysis into U.S. mortgage markets by providing detailed information about mortgage borrowers, lenders, and properties.<br><br>Since 2006, the HMDA data were published by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) in an accessible format (CSV). Prior to 2006, the data are only available from the National Archives in fixed-width text format. This project seeks to convert the data prior to 2006 into a more accessible delimited format for easier analysis into historical mortgage market trends.<br><br> These data are provided as-is. I will continue to refine these data over time to provide the most accurate data on historical market trends. All codes will be available on my GitHub account.<br><br><b>Important Note:</b> Since the HMDA data include detailed information on borrowers, loan amounts, and property locations (by census tract) it may be possible (albeit incredibly time and resource intensive) to match the HMDA records with publicly available borrower information. Do not do this. It is unethical to conduct research by identifying individuals from these public data. In fact, in downloading these ICPSR clearly states that one should "not use these datasets for investigation of specific RESEARCH SUBJECTS, except when identification is authorized in writing by ICPSR." The HMDA data are collected and published to further the goal of anti-discrimination in U.S. housing markets. Using the data to re-identify borrowers is clearly a violation of this objective.<br>