Mortgage loss-given-default (LGD) increased significantly when house prices plummeted and delinquencies rose during the financial crisis, but it has remained over 40 percent in recent years despite a strong housing recovery. Our results indicate that the sustained high LGDs post-crisis are due...

We document changes in borrowers' sensitivity to negative equity and show heightened borrower default propensity as a fundamental driver of crisis period mortgage defaults. Estimates of a time-varying coefficient competing risk hazard model reveal a marked run-up in the default option beta from...

We find substantial regional variations in CMBS loan default rates based on a 10-year history of nearly 38,000 CMBS loans. We seek to explain those variations with well documented risk factors such as negative equity, insolvency, property type, originator and state foreclosure law, as well as...

We expand on the standard commercial mortgage default model and create a new model by looking beyond the usual factors of option value, insolvency, property type, region, originator type, state foreclosure laws and macroeconomic measures. The new model incorporates measures of local economic...