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Working Paper
Flood Risk Exposures and Mortgage-Backed Security Asset Performance and Risk Sharing
The distribution of risks for residential real estate, including flood risk, depends largely on how these risks are allocated across individual mortgages and within mortgage-backed securities (MBS). This paper is the first to document how flood risks relate not only to individual mortgage performance and underwriting, but also how flood risks correlate to MBS performance and structure. Across residential mortgages we find that defaults are concentrated among the most flood-prone properties and this risk is somewhat offset by larger down payments and slightly higher mortgage rates. Even when ...
Working Paper
Not Cashing In on Cashing Out: An Analysis of Low Cash-Out Refinance Rates
Lowering a borrower’s interest rate is one of the most effective ways to reduce a borrower’s debt burden. Mortgage refinancing offers a chance to shift debt balances from high-interest loans into a low-interest mortgage through “cashing out” some of the home’s equity. Borrowers could reduce their monthly payments by up to 13 percent by folding a student loan with a 6 percent interest rate into a mortgage with a 3 percent interest rate. Using anonymized data on mortgage refinancing behavior, we find that over half of borrowers with high-interest loans and available home equity do not ...
Working Paper
California Wildfires, Property Damage, and Mortgage Repayment
This paper examines wildfires’ impact on mortgage repayment using novel data that combines property-level damages and mortgage performance data. We find that 90-day delinquencies were 4 percentage points higher and prepayments were 16 percentage points higher for properties that were damaged by wildfires compared to properties 1 to 2 miles outside of the wildfire, which suggests higher risks to mortgage markets than found in previous studies. We find no significant changes in delinquency or prepayment for undamaged properties inside a wildfire boundary. Prepayments are not driven by ...