The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages lenders to make mortgage loans to certain classes of borrowers. However, the law does not apply to all lenders, and lenders do not necessarily receive credit for all loans made to borrowers of a particular class. We use this variation to test...

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) requires lenders "to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions.'' For proponents of efficient markets, the CRA is a threat to lender profitability. For...

To assess whether homeowners know their house values and mortgage terms, we compare the distributions of these variables in the household-reported 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to the distributions in lender-reported data. We also examine the share of SCF respondents who report not...

We derive a theoretical model of how jumbo and conforming mortgage rates are determined and how the jumbo-conforming spread might arise. We show that mortgage rates reflect the cost of funding mortgages and that this cost of funding can drive a wedge between jumbo and conforming rates (the...

The growth of the mortgage market in recent years has raised the question of what effects, if any, the hedging of mortgage portfolios has on the behavior of long-term interest rates. This paper finds that the volatility of the ten-year swap rate implied by swaptions increases when the prepayment...

This paper develops a model of the interactions between borrowers, originators, and a securitizer in primary and secondary mortgage markets. In the secondary market, the securitizer adds liquidity and plays a strategic game with mortgage originators. The securitizer sets the price at which it...

As foreclosure initiations have soared over the past couple of years, many have questioned whether mortgage servicers have the right incentives to work out troubled subprime mortgages so that borrowers can avoid foreclosure and remain in their homes. Some critics claim that because servicers,...

The bank lending channel of monetary policy suggests that banks play a special role in the transmission of monetary policy. We look for this special role by examining the business strategies of banks as it relates to mortgage funding and mortgage lending. "Traditional banks" have a large supply...

A central question in the literature on mortgage default is at what point underwater homeowners walk away from their homes even if they can afford to pay. We study borrowers from Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada who purchased homes in 2006 using non-prime mortgages with 100 percent...

Past research argues that changes in adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) payments may lead households to cut back on consumption or to default on their mortgages. In this paper, we argue that these outcomes are more likely if ARM borrowers are borrowing constrained, and find that ARM borrowers...