This paper argues that during the housing bubble, housing finance markets failed to price risk correctly because of information failure caused by the complexity and heterogeneity of private-label mortgage-backed securities and structured finance products. Addressing the informational problems...

This paper establishes a theoretical and empirical link between the use of aggressive mortgage lending instruments, such as interest only, negative amortization or subprime, mortgages, and the underlying house prices. Such instruments, which come into existence through innovation or financial...

This paper establishes a theoretical and empirical link between the use of aggressive mortgage lending instruments, such as interest only, negative amortization or subprime, mortgages, and the underlying house prices. Such instruments, which come into existence through innovation or financial...

This article describes the causes of the boom and bust in the U.S. housing market, which brought down not just the U.S. financial system but the global economy. How did this vicious cycle begin? How did home prices appreciate so far and so fast? Why did rational investors not recognize and stop...

With private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS), investors bore default risk; while this risk should have been priced, as systemic risk grew, the pricing of risk did not increase. This paper attempts to explain why this happened. We point to market institutions' incentive misalignments that...