The dramatic expansion in subprime mortgage credit fueled a remarkable boom and bust in the US housing market and created a global financial crisis. Even though considerable research examines the housing and mortgage markets during the previous decade, how the expansion in mortgage credit...

This paper develops a formula to numerically estimate the unsubsidized, fair-market value of the toxic assets purchased with Federal Reserve loans. It finds that subsidy rates on these loans were on average 33.9 percent at origination. In contrast, by the 3rd quarter of the 2010, there was on...

We propose a new mortgage contract that endogenously captures the risk of house price declines to minimize default risk resulting from changes in the underlying asset value while still retaining contract rates near the cost of a standard fixed-rate mortgage. By reducing the role of the legal...

This article examines the impact of regulation on lending standards during the mortgage boom. We exploit the overall regulatory wedge between banks and independent mortgage companies (IMCs) and a variation in this regulatory wedge across states induced by a cross-sectional variation in state...

This paper models Continuous Workout Mortgages (CWMs) in an economic environment with refinancings and prepayments by employing a market-observable variable such as the house price index of the pertaining locality. Our main results include: (a) explicit modelling of repayment and interest-only...

How did investors holding assets backed by subprime residential mortgages react when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the so-called "teaser freezer" plan to modify mortgages in December 2007? We apply event-study methodology to the ABX index, the only source of daily securities prices in...

We examine the relation between bank risk management procedures and sales of mortgages during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Research suggests that banks employing an originate-to-distribute strategy devoted little effort to screening, thereby diminishing their ability to sell loans during...

This paper studies the Continuous Workout Mortgage (CWM), a two in one product: a fixed rate home loan coupled with negative equity insurance, to advocate its viability in mitigating financial fragility. In order to tackle the many issues that CWMs embrace, we perform a range of tasks. We...

We study the relationship between funding liquidity and the valuation of mortgage-backed securities. Most of the financing for mortgage-backed securities occurs through a trade known as a dollar roll, the simultaneous sale and purchase of forward contracts on mortgage-backed securities that is...

This paper uses a numerical simulation based on the Crank-Nicolson method to estimate the value of a fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) with embedded prepayment and non-defaultable options. We find that the value of the FRM will increase when interest rates decrease, increasing the incentive for...