The premium embedded in home mortgage loans to compensate investors for their exposure to prepayment risk is a significant component of the cost of home mortgage lending. Moreover, there is some reason to believe that prepayment risk may be lower for loans to lower-income housing borrowers,...

The study departs from most previous work by examining mortgage termination behavior at the household level and by examining the totality of terminations, due to both call behavior and mobility behavior. It exploits information in the American Housing Surveys (AHS) to examine national...

This paper examines the variation in the rates of house price appreciation within an individual metropolitan market. A methodology is developed to examine the locational variation in house price changes in Dade County (Miami) Florida, from 1971 to 1992. House price appreciation appears to be...

The prepayment behavior of home mortgage borrowers has been widely observed to be inconsistent with behavior implied by classical option theory. A substantial literature has emerged examining the problem, focusing on the characteristics of the mortgage and on the historic path of interest rates...

The development of sub-metropolitan house price indices is of interest to homeowners, to home mortgage lenders, and to many regulators and urban policy makers. However, the evolution of sub-metropolitan indices is plagued by the sparsity of home sales transactions. Recent innovations in...

Option-based models of mortgage default posit that the central measure of default risk is the loan-to-value (LVT) ratio. We argue, however, that an unrecognized problem with extending the basic option model to exisiting multifamily and commercial mortgages is that key variables in the option...

The use of home equity conversion debt creates a compounding obligation against the home that makes collateral deficiency a potentially dominant risk. Using an insurance methodology, an examination of this risk and its impact upon the potential for home equity conversion is conducted. The paper...

Option-based models of mortgage default posit that the central measure of default risk is the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. We argue, however, that an unrecognized problem with extending the basic option model to existing multifamily and commercial mortgages is that key variables in the option...

Residential mortgage borrowers frequently appear to behave suboptimally with respect to their mortgage prepayment options. Many borrowers fail to exercise even well-into-the-money options while others prepay when the call option is out-of-the-money. To account for these apparently suboptimal...