Two recent articles by Hancock and Passmore (2016) and Passmore and von Hafften (2017) make several suggestions for improving the home mortgage contract to make homeownership more achievable for creditworthy borrowers. Though the proposals in the two papers differ in some aspects, one common...

We exploit a unique data set that features both un-intermediated mortgage requests and independent offers from multiple banks for each request. We show that households typically are not prudent risk managers but prioritize the minimization of current mortgage payments over the risk of possible...

Life insurers are exposed to interest rate risk, and their liability side is typically more sensitive to interest rate changes than their asset side. This paper develops an accounting-based measure of interest rate sensitivity. My approach uses the coexistence of historical cost and market value...