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This study addresses two largely unanswered questions about the United States subprime crisis: why were minority applicants, who had been excluded from equal access to mortgage credit prior to the spread of subprime loans, superincluded in subprime mortgage lending? And why didn't the flood of mortgage credit in the 2000s housing boom -an oversupply of credit suggesting supercompetition -reduce the proportion of minority and women borrowers burdened with unpayable subprime mortgages? This contribution develops a meso analysis showing how banking strategies were shaped by and reinforced patterns of racial and gender inequality, permitting lenders in evolving financial markets to offer new loan instruments to previously excluded loan applicants, and to exercise social power over -and thus extract rent from -these borrowers.

Using the PSID Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the corresponding PSID main data sets, we examine whether home ownership has positive effects on the academic achievement of children after correcting for selectivity bias and controlling for home environment, neighborhood quality, residential stability, and income. While we find no independent effects of home ownership, there are positive significant effects of home environment, neighborhood quality, and residential stability on the reading and math performance of children between the ages of three and twelve. The main policy implication of our study is that improvement of a child's home environment, residential stability, and the quality of the neighborhood is more important than ownership of a home to achieve better child outcomes. Subsidized home ownership can lead to better child outcomes to the extent that it places a child in a better home environment, in a more stable residence, and in a better neighborhood.

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