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A Model of Mortgage Default
TL;DR: In this article, a dynamic model of households' mortgage decisions incorporating labor income, house price, inflation, and interest rate risk is proposed to solve a zero-profit condition for mortgage lenders to solve for equilibrium mortgage rates given borrower characteristics and optimal decisions.
Abstract: This paper solves a dynamic model of households' mortgage decisions incorporating labor income, house price, inflation, and interest rate risk. It uses a zero-profit condition for mortgage lenders to solve for equilibrium mortgage rates given borrower characteristics and optimal decisions. The model quantifies the effects of adjustable vs. fixed mortgage rates, loan-to-value ratios, and mortgage affordability measures on mortgage premia and default. Heterogeneity in borrowers' labor income risk is important for explaining the higher default rates on adjustable-rate mortgages during the recent US housing downturn, and the variation in mortgage premia with the level of interest rates.
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TL;DR: The first hints of trouble in the mortgage market surfaced in mid-2005, and conditions subsequently began to deteriorate rapidly as mentioned in this paper, and by the third quarter of 2008, the share of seriously delinquent mortgages had surged to 5.2%.
Abstract: The first hints of trouble in the mortgage market surfaced in mid-2005, and conditions subsequently began to deteriorate rapidly. According to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, the share of mortgage loans that were “seriously delinquent” (90 days or more past due or in the process of foreclosure) averaged 1.7 percent from 1979 to 2006, with a low of about 0.7 percent (in 1979) and a high of about 2.4 percent (in 2002). But by the third quarter of 2008, the share of seriously delinquent mortgages had surged to 5.2 percent. These delinquencies foreshadowed a sharp rise in foreclosures: roughly 1.7 million foreclosures were started in the first three quarters of 2008, an increase of 62 percent from the 1.1 million in the first three quarters of 2007 (Federal Reserve estimates based on data from the Mortgage Bankers Association). No precise national data exist on what share of foreclosures that start are actually completed, but anecdotal evidence suggests that historically the proportion has been somewhat less than half (Cordell, Dynan, Lehnert, Liang, and Mauskopf, 2008). Mortgage defaults and delinquencies are particularly concentrated among borrowers whose mortgages are classified as “subprime” or “near-prime.” Some key players in the mortgage market typically group these two into a single category, which we will call “nonprime” lending. Although the categories are not rigidly defined, subprime loans are generally targeted to borrowers who have tarnished credit histories and little savings available for down payments. Near-prime mortgages are made to borrowers with more minor credit quality issues or borrowers who are unable or unwilling to
641 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the effect of government assistance on bank risk taking was studied using data on bank applications to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and showed that banks initiate riskier loans and shift assets toward riskier securities after government support, but this shift in risk occurs mostly within the same asset class and remains undetected by regulatory capital ratios, which indicate improved capitalization at bailed-out banks.
Abstract: Using novel data on bank applications to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), we study the effect of government assistance on bank risk taking. Bailed-out banks initiate riskier loans and shift assets toward riskier securities after government support. However, this shift in risk occurs mostly within the same asset class and, therefore, remains undetected by regulatory capital ratios, which indicate improved capitalization at bailed-out banks. Consequently, these banks appear safer according to regulatory ratios, but show an increase in volatility and default risk. These findings are robust to controlling for credit demand and account for selection of TARP recipients by exploiting banks’ geography-based political connections as an instrument for bailout approvals.
368 citations
Cites background from "A Model of Mortgage Default"
...This variable is available for both approved and denied applications and has been shown to be a good predictor of mortgage default (Campbell and Cocco, 2011)....
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TL;DR: The authors assesses the relative importance of two key drivers of mortgage default: negative equity and illiquidity, with comparably sized marginal effects, and find that negative equity is significantly associated with mortgage default.
Abstract: This paper assesses the relative importance of two key drivers of mortgage default: negative equity and illiquidity. To do so, the authors combine loan-level mortgage data with detailed credit bureau information about the borrower's broader balance sheet. This gives them a direct way to measure illiquid borrowers: those with high credit card utilization rates. The authors find that both negative equity and illiquidity are significantly associated with mortgage default, with comparably sized marginal effects. Moreover, these two factors interact with each other: The effect of illiquidity on default generally increases with high combined loan-to-value ratios (CLTV), though it is significant even for low CLTV. County-level unemployment shocks are also associated with higher default risk (though less so than high utilization) and strongly interact with CLTV. In addition, having a second mortgage implies significantly higher default risk, particularly for borrowers who have a first-mortgage LTV approaching 100 percent.
283 citations
TL;DR: A review of the evolution and most recent developments of household finance can be found in this article, with a focus on the normative and positive study of how households use financial markets to achieve their objectives.
Abstract: Household finance—the normative and positive study of how households use financial markets to achieve their objectives—has gained a lot of attention over the past decade and has become a field with its own identity, style, and agenda. In this chapter we review its evolution and most recent developments.
280 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors revisited the standard user cost model of housing prices and concluded that the predicted impact of interest rates on prices is much lower once the model is generalized to include mean-reverting interest rates, mobility, prepayment, elastic housing supply, and credit-constrained home buyers.
Abstract: Between 1996 and 2006, real housing prices rose by 53 percent according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency price index. One explanation of this boom is that it was caused by easy credit in the form of low real interest rates, high loan-to-value levels and permissive mortgage approvals. We revisit the standard user cost model of housing prices and conclude that the predicted impact of interest rates on prices is much lower once the model is generalized to include mean-reverting interest rates, mobility, prepayment, elastic housing supply, and credit-constrained home buyers. The modest predicted impact of interest rates on prices is in line with empirical estimates, and it suggests that lower real rates can explain only one-fifth of the rise in prices from 1996 to 2006. We also find no convincing evidence that changes in approval rates or loan-to-value levels can explain the bulk of the changes in house prices, but definitive judgments on those mechanisms cannot be made without better corrections for the endogeneity of borrowers' decisions to apply for mortgages.
280 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the problem of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow, and the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior.
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow, and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior. When consumers are relatively impatient, and when labor income is independently and identically distributed over time, assets act like a buffer stock, protecting consumption against bad draws of income. The precautionary demand for saving interacts with the borrowing constraints to provide a motive for holding assets. If the income process is positively autocorrelated, but stationary, assets are still used to buffer consumption, but do so less effectively, and at a greater cost in terms of foregone consumption. In the limit, when labor income is a random walk, it is optimal for impatient liquidity constrained consumers simply to consume their incomes. As a consequence, a liquidity constrained representative agent cannot generate aggregate U.S. saving behavior if that agent receives aggregate labor income. Either there is no saving, when income is a random walk, or saving is contracyclical over the business cycle, when income changes are positively autocorrelated. However, in reality, microeconomic income processes do not resemble their average, and it is possible to construct a model of microeconomic saving under liquidity constraints which, at the aggregate level, reproduces many of the stylized facts in the actual data. While it is clear that many households are not liquidity constrained, and do not behave as described here, the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life-cycle models.
1,730 citations
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TL;DR: This article argued that the typical household's saving is better described by a buffer-stock version than by the traditional version of the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis (LC/PIH) model.
Abstract: This paper argues that the typical household's saving is better described by a buffer-stock version than by the traditional version of the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis (LC/PIH) model Buffer-stock behavior emerges if consumers with important income uncertainty are sufficiently impatient In the traditional model consumption growth is determined solely by tastes; in contract buffer-stock consumers set average consumption growth equal to average labor income growth regardless of tastes The model can explain three empirical puzzles: the consumption/income parallel of Carroll and Summers [1991]; the consumption/income divergence first documented in the 1930's; and the temporal stability of the household age/wealth profile despite the unpredictability of idiosyncratic wealth changes
1,309 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an asset-market model of the housing market and estimate how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the stock of owner-occupied housing.
Abstract: Inflation reduces the effective cost of homeownership and raises the tax subsidy to owner occupation. This paper presents an asset-market model of the housing market and estimates how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the housing capital stock. Simulation results suggest that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s, which substantially reduced homeowners' user costs, could have accounted for as much as a 30 percent increase in real house prices. Persistent high inflation rates could lead ultimately to a sizable increase in the stock of owner-occupied housing.
1,262 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices.
Abstract: We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the price-to-rent ratio, and the price-to-income ratio can be misleading because they fail to account both for the time series pattern of real long-term interest rates and predictable differences in the long-run growth rates of house prices across local markets. These factors are especially important in recent years because house prices are theoretically more sensitive to interest rates when rates are already low, and more sensitive still in those cities where the long-run rate of house price growth is high. During the 1980s, our measures show that houses looked most overvalued in many of the same cities that subsequently experienced the largest house price declines. We find that from the trough of 1995 to 2004, the cost of owning rose somewhat relative to the cost of renting, but not, in most cities, to levels that made houses look overvalued.
1,074 citations
TL;DR: This article showed that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and increase in defaults from 2006 to 2008.
Abstract: Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in defaults from 2006 to 2008. Employing land topology-based housing supply elasticity as an instrument for house price growth, we estimate that the average homeowner extracts 25 cents for every dollar increase in home equity. Home equity-based borrowing is stronger for younger households, households with low credit scores, and households with high initial credit card utilization rates. Money extracted from increased home equity is not used to purchase new real estate or pay down high credit card balances, which suggests that borrowed funds may be used for real outlays. Lower credit quality households living in high house price appreciation areas experience a relative decline in default rates from 2002 to 2006 as they borrow heavily against their home equity, but experience very high default rates from 2006 to 2008. Our conservative estimates suggest that home equity-based borrowing added $1.25 trillion in household debt, and accounts for at least 39% of new defaults from 2006 to 2008.
997 citations