Paul S. Willen

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine more than 100,000 homeowners in Massachusetts who had negative equity during the early 1990s and find that fewer than 10 percent of these owners eventually lost their home to foreclosure.

TL;DR: This article developed a simple theoretical model to interpret these empirical findings and to assess potential foreclosure-reduction policies, which implies that lenders and policymakers face an information problem in trying to help borrowers with negative equity, because it is hard to determine which owners really need help in order to stay in their homes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate whether market participants underestimated the likelihood of a fall in home prices or the sensitivity of foreclosures to falling prices, and they show that given available data, they should have understood that a significant price drop would raise foreclosure sharply, although loan-level models would have predicted a smaller rise than occurred.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed homeownership experiences in Massachusetts over the 1989-2007 period using a competing risks, proportional hazard framework, and found that homeownerships that begin with a subprime purchase mortgage end up in foreclosure almost 20 percent of the time, or more than 6 times as often as experiences that start with prime purchase mortgages.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that a property in distress affects the value of neighboring properties from the time when the borrower becomes seriously delinquent on the mortgage until well after the bank sells the property to a new owner.