Search Results
Journal Article
House prices and subprime mortgage delinquencies
In this Economic Letter, we explore how the pace of and change in house-price appreciation can affect the incentives and opportunities for borrowers in a market to avoid delinquencies and foreclosures. For instance, with likely gains in home equity in markets where house prices have risen significantly, a homeowner should have greater incentives and opportunities to keep a mortgage loan current. Indeed, we show that markets that recently experienced greater house-price appreciation tended to have lower delinquency rates and smaller increases in delinquency rates. We also find that ...
Conference Paper
Forecasting supervisory ratings using securities market information
Working Paper
Returns on illiquid assets: are they fair games?
The simplest tests of capital market efficiency are tests of the fair game model: conditional expected returns less the interest rate are equal to zero. The fair game model is thought to obtain only when markets are perfectly liquid. We show that this conjecture is false. In a model of the housing market where heterogeneous agents must search for partners in order to trade, excess returns on housing wealth are fair games if, as is appropriate, returns are defined to include shadow prices measuring illiquidity.
Journal Article
Aggregation in bank stress tests
How well stress tests measure a bank?s ability to survive adverse conditions depends on the statistical modeling approach used. Banks can access data on loan characteristics to precisely estimate individual default risk. However, macroeconomic scenarios used for stress tests?as well as the reports banks must provide?are for a bank?s entire portfolio. So, is it better to aggregate the data before or after applying the model? Research suggests a middle-of-the-road approach that applies models to data aggregated at an intermediate level can produce accurate and stable results.
Journal Article
Retail sweeps and reserves
Journal Article
Residential investment over the real estate cycle
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. Two commonly cited indicators are an apparent slowing of sales of new and existing homes and a buildup of inventories of new homes in many markets. In this Economic Letter, I characterize past episodes of residential investment downturns and evaluate how specific housing market variables, such as sales ...
Journal Article
House prices and bank loan performance
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.
Working Paper
Regime shifts in real estate markets: Time-varying effects of the U.S. and Japanese economies on house prices in Hawaii
We show that house prices may be driven entirely by the demands of one identifiable group for several years and then by demands of another group at other times. We present evidence that house prices in Hawaii were subject to such regime shifts. Prices responded to demands associated with American income and wealth for most years from 1975 through 2008. From the middle of the 1980s through the early 1990s, however, house prices responded to Japanese income and wealth. Statistical tests indicate that the regime-shifting model outperformed the constant-coefficient model. The regime shifting ...
Journal Article
Cap rates and commercial property prices
Commercial real estate capitalization rates have been found to be good indicators of expected returns in commercial properties. Recent declines in these cap rates appear to be signaling a commercial real estate rebound, indicating improved investor expectations of price growth in the market. Movements in national cap rates are the predominant drivers of changes in cap rates in local markets. Therefore, the anticipated commercial real estate rebound is likely to be widespread across many metropolitan areas.
Journal Article
Tech stocks and house prices in California