{"paper":{"title":"A Unified Credit Expansion Theory on Housing Cycle: Causal Evidence for Within- and Cross-Metro Patterns in the Prior, Boom, Bust, and Recovery Periods","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"q-fin.GN","authors_text":"Bo Li","submitted_at":"2026-07-13T23:15:50Z","abstract_excerpt":"During the 1999-2019 U.S. housing cycle, three empirical facts present a puzzle: in the boom period, the correlation between income growth and mortgage growth is (1) negative across ZIP codes within a metropolitan area, but (2) positive across metropolitan areas, and (3) the metropolitan areas that experience the worst bust also show the strongest recovery. I develop a unified credit expansion theory that explains both within- and cross-metro patterns in the prior, boom, bust, and recovery periods (including the three facts above) and generates new testable implications of ``double differences"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.12205","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.12205/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}