We analyze a model of mortgage markets, housing tenure choice, heterogeneous agents, and default with closed form solutions. We uncover new insights which may inspire empirical work, and we ground already-established insights in a series of tractable expressions. Then we study optimal LTV...

We use the new market for Credit Risk Transfers (CRTs) and the landfall of two major hurricanes to study both how markets price default risk from natural disasters, and how U.S. mortgage rates would change in absence of government-backed guarantees. First, we exploit that CRTs differ in the...

This paper proposes a tractable way to incorporate lending standards ("credit qualification thresholds") into macro models of financial frictions. Banks can reject borrowers whose risk is above an endogenous threshold at which no lending rate sufficiently compensates banks for the borrowers’...