Institutions often offer a menu of contracts to consumers in an attempt to create a separating equilibrium that reveals borrower types and provides better pricing. We test the effectiveness of a specific set of contracts in the mortgage market: mortgage points. Points allow borrowers to exchange...

U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee considered many important banking reforms in 2009-2010 including the Dodd-Frank Act. We show that during this period, the foreclosure starts on delinquent mortgages were delayed in the districts of committee members even though there was...

We document that increasing penalties for default reduces strategic default in financial crises by exploiting the 2009 changes to Canadian consumer insolvency regulations. Our novelty is that the incentives from increasing penalties for default operate in the opposite direction from incentives...

A review of the 2007-2008 financial crisis is conducted. We synthesize the insights provided by literature on the impact of this crisis on the United States and other countries. The extant literature on the policies undertaken by policymakers in United States and Europe and their global impact...

In the thirteen years since the onset of 2007-2008 financial crisis, economists and researchers have thoroughly investigated the financial crisis. We conduct a selective review of the extant literature on the financial crisis, with special emphasis on the US mortgage markets, as they were the...

Using a unique dataset of home equity credit contracts, we examine the benefits of joint liability lending. Our results show that the risk of default for joint borrowers with similar risk scores is significantly lower than the risk associated with single borrowers. However, when joint borrowers...

This paper studies a largely overlooked and important segment of the mortgage market in explaining the recent financial crisis — the condominium loan market, which experienced a 15-fold increase in origination and constituted 15% of the overall residential loan originations from 2001 to 2007....