Prominent policy makers assert that managerial short-termism was at the root of the subprime crisis of 2007-2009. Prior scholarly research, however, largely rejects this assertion. Using a more comprehensive measure of CEO incentives for short-termism, we uncover evidence that short-termism...

This study uses the 2008 mortgage crisis to demonstrate how the relationship between vertical integration and performance crucially depends on corporate governance. Prior research has argued that the vertical integration of mortgage origination and securitization aligned divisional incentives...

We introduce a novel application of machine learning to compare the Pooling and Servicing Agreements (PSA) that govern asset-backed securities. The PSA is often viewed as mostly boilerplate legal text and thus may appear similar across deals despite heterogeneity in the underlying collateral and...

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, banks should ensure that incentive compensation policies appropriately balance long-term risk with short-term rewards. Using daily output data from mortgage officers in a US commercial bank, we test the notion that nonlinear contracts create...

Studies of mortgage approvals find that minority borrowers are more likely to be denied loans, even when background variables such as current-year income are held constant. This article demonstrates that relying on current year income when comparing racial outcomes leads to an overestimation of...

This paper explains how unobserved borrower risk factors and changing economic expectations can interact to create vintage effects and parameter instability in mortgage credit risk models. We develop a model of mortgage choice and default behavior that demonstrates how this could have led to...

This Article argues for a new regulatory approach that could both increase market efficiency and protect informational privacy in the modern information economy. It explores that approach - information intermediation, or infomediation - in the context of the current debates about re-engineering...

The Great Recession resulted in bank failures that exceeded the savings and loan (S&L) crisis in terms of percentage of institutions and the volume of assets of banks that failed. While much of the literature focuses “subprime” mortgages and its role in this financial crisis, we focus on the...

I study the effects of an increase in the supply of local mortgage credit on local house prices and employment by exploiting a natural experiment from Switzerland. In mid-2008, losses in U.S. security holdings triggered a migration of dissatisfied retail customers from a large, universal bank,...

I develop a structural model of mortgage demand and lender competition to study how leverage regulation affects the equilibrium in the UK mortgage market. Using variation in risk-weighted capital requirements across lenders and across mortgages with differential loan-to-values, I show that a...