Loan modifications offer one strategy to prevent mortgage foreclosures by lowering interest rates, extending loan terms and/or reducing principal balance owed. Yet modifications are largely at the discretion of loan servicers and not as systematically transparent as loan application approvals...

Credit underwriting is a dynamic process involving multiple interactions between borrower and lender. During this process, lenders have the opportunity to obtain hard and soft information from the borrower. We analyze more than 108,000 home equity loans and lines-of-credit applications to study...

We develop a tractable general equilibrium framework of housing and mortgage markets with aggregate and idiosyncratic risks, costly liquidity and strategic defaults, empirically relevant informational asymmetries, and endogenous mortgage design. We show that adverse selection plays an important...

We analyze more than 74,000 home equity loans and lines of credit to study the role of information asymmetry. This credit market is characterized by borrowers who face a menu of contract options with varying collateral requirements and prices. Our results show that a less credit worthy applicant...

This paper documents that mortgage market deregulation helps mitigate the risk of population aging by affecting a foundational family-level decision: the choice to have children. Using a US federal regulator ruling, I show that young households fully exposed to mortgage market deregulation...

The recent global financial crisis, sparked by developments in the American mortgage market, provides a timely opportunity for a thorough analysis of the standard model for financing home purchases. The United States residential mortgage market has two prominent aspects: first, a significant...

The Danish financial sector is big and there is a high degree of inter-connectedness between banks, mortgage institutions and pension funds. Danish households have large balance sheets and high levels of gross debt. Even though the high debt levels are matched by large assets, notably in form of...

This chapter considers the structure of mortgage finance in the United States and its role in shaping patterns of homeownership, the nature of the housing stock, and the organization of residential activity. We start by providing some background on the design features of mortgage contracts that...

Empirical research on the causes of financial crises has grown in recent decades. Early work, such as that by Kaminsky and Reinhart, helped establish the link between asset prices and banking crises. While this initial research focused on equity prices, subsequent research expanded the analysis...

How does the design of debt repayment schedules affect household borrowing? To answer this question, we exploit a Swedish policy reform that eliminated interest-only mortgages for loan-to-value ratios above 50%. We document substantial bunching at the threshold, leading to 5% lower borrowing....