When housing prices crashed, people lost their equity, but their debts did not disappear. They cut back on consumption, and the economy fell into recession. And, importantly, the households with the largest debt burdens cut back the most. Mr. Sufi and Mr. Mian found that for every $10,000 decline in home values, families with high debt burdens reduced spending on autos by $300, while families with low debt burdens reduced spending on autos by just $100.

The housing crash, in other words, took away the greatest share of wealth from the part of the population that had been most likely to spend it. The point, Mr. Mian and Mr. Sufi said, was that the economy had crashed the financial system.

The Obama administration considered several ways to reduce mortgage debts during the heart of the crisis. It promised to pursue a few, too, including empowering bankruptcy courts to forgive debts, paying lenders and buying up loans. But ultimately, the administration adopted a limited aid program and gambled that an economic recovery would take care of the problem. Mr. Mian and Mr. Sufi are not particular about which method of reducing debt would have been best; their point is simply that the government, by failing to do more, inhibited the recovery.

Their research is now widely cited as demonstrating that the overhang of household debt contributed to the slow pace of the recovery; one such citation came in the 2012 Economic Report of the President. Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who wrote the report and was then the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said he considered their work important for suggesting that in areas where the economic recovery was slow, “that weak demand was the source of their economic problems, not credit market failures.”

Mr. Sufi said he was delighted that policy makers were listening. “It was always the goal for me to write research that would be policy-relevant,” he said. “People asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I’m pretty sure I just wanted to be right.”

Yet some admirers of their research, like Ms. Romer, wonder whether Mr. Mian’s and Mr. Sufi’s book overstates the significance of their findings by asserting that debt was the driving force in the recession.

Image Amir Sufi, co-author of "House of Debt." Credit... Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times

Americans lost a similar amount of wealth during the housing crash as during the collapse of Internet-related stocks in 2000, but the economic consequences of the housing crash were much larger. The difference, in the view of Mr. Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, and other economists, is that the housing crash precipitated a financial crisis. Mr. Bernanke has noted that the worst of the economic downturn did not begin until the markets crashed in the fall of 2008, and that it ended once the financial crisis was arrested. The recovery has been slow, he has said, because of factors including cuts in government spending and Europe’s malaise.