This Letter discusses the strong link between house price depreciation and defaults on loans for residential mortgages as well as for land development and construction.

As 2006 draws to a close, one economic development that stands out over the year is the slowdown in the housing sector. In particular, the slowdown raises concerns about the perceived shift households have made toward "alternative" mortgage products, which may leave them more exposed to negative...

Much attention recently has been given to the possibility of a slowdown in the U.S. residential real estate market. While real residential investment has continued to grow and existing house prices have held up through the first quarter of 2006, analysts have pointed to other signs of slowing....

Supervisory BOPEC ratings were assigned to bank holding companies (BHCs) during the years 1987 to 2004 as a summary of their overall performance and level of supervisory concern. In this article, we examine the stability of the BOPEC ratings assigned over that period. We model supervisory...

Residential real estate markets often go through "hot" and "cold" periods. A hot market is one where prices are rising, liquidity is good in that average selling times are short, and the volume of transactions is higher than the norm. Cold markets have just the opposite characteristics - prices...

In the wake of the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the separation of banking from commercial activity is now one of the few remaining pieces of Depression-era banking law. In this article I explore the incentives that banks and commercial firms might have to affiliate. I also outline some...

Bank supervisory monitoring, both on-site and off-site, generates a wealth of information with which to judge the safety and soundness of banks and bank holding companies (BHCs). For BHCs with publicly traded securities, the monitoring efforts of investors generate additional information that...