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Journal Article
Collateral Damage: House Prices and Consumption During the Great Recession
Did a decline in house prices cause the Great Recession? And if so, how? Credit constraints may be the key to answering those questions
Journal Article
The promise and challenges of bank capital reform
The failure and bailout of some prominent financial institutions amid the crisis of 2007-09, and the effect these events had on the economy as a whole, have led policymakers to rethink how the global financial system is regulated. These changes, commonly known as the Basel III Accords, will require banks to maintain more capital in reserve, hold higher-quality capital, and assign greater risk weights to certain types of assets.
Working Paper
Collateral, credit history, and the financial decelerator
The author develops a simple model in which financial imperfections can serve to stabilize aggregate fluctuations and not merely aggravate them as in much of the previous literature; the author terms this a financial decelerator. In the model agents borrow to purchase housing and secure their loans with this long-lived asset. There are two financial imperfections in this model. First, agents are unable to commit to repay their loans ? that is, they can strategically default. This limits the amount that lenders are willing to offer. In addition, however, lenders are also imperfectly informed ...
Working Paper
Understanding house price index revisions
Residential house price indexes (HPI) are used for a large variety of macroeconomic and microeconomic research and policy purposes, as well as for automated valuation models. As is well known, these indexes are subject to substantial revisions in the months following the initial release, both because transaction data can be slow to come in, and as a consequence of the repeat sales methodology, which interpolates the effect of sales over the entire period since the house last changed hands. We study the properties of the revisions to the CoreLogic House Price Index. This index is used both by ...
Journal Article
Regulating short-sales
Short-selling, the practice of selling a security the seller does not own, is done in an attempt to profit from an expected decline in the price of the security. During the recent financial turmoil, many press accounts blamed short-selling for declines in stock prices and even for the collapse of some firms. In "Regulating Short-Sales," Ronel Elul discusses the issue of short-selling. He notes that research has shown that short-selling plays a valuable role in setting accurate prices for securities but that it can also be used to facilitate market manipulation. This latter consideration ...
Journal Article
The economics of asset securitization
Ronel Elul explains why asset-backed securities exist and discusses some reasons for their common structure. Elul notes that despite well-developed theories on the what and why of securitization, more research is needed. In particular, additional research could uncover the effect that government regulation and bankruptcy law have on securitization.
Working Paper
Bankruptcy: Is it enough to forgive or must we also forget?
In many countries, lenders are not permitted to use information about past defaults after a specified period of time has elapsed. The authors model this provision and determine conditions under which it is optimal. ; They develop a model in which entrepreneurs must repeatedly seek external funds to finance a sequence of risky projects under conditions of both adverse selection and moral hazard. They show that forgetting a default makes incentives worse, ex-ante, because it reduces the punishment for failure. However, following a default it is generally good to forget, because pooling riskier ...
Working Paper
What \"triggers\" mortgage default?
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 ...
Discussion Paper
Cyclicality and the Severity of the U.S. Supervisory Stress Test: 2014 to 2018
In this study, we provide a measure of the severity of the 2014-2018 US supervisory stress tests, and examine how that severity measure has evolved.
Working Paper
Owner occupancy fraud and mortgage performance
We use a matched credit bureau and mortgage data set to identify occupancy fraud in residential mortgage originations, that is, borrowers who misrepresented their occupancy status as owner occupants rather than residential real estate investors. In contrast to previous studies, our data set allows us to show that such fraud was broad based, appearing in the government-sponsored enterprise market and in loans held on bank portfolios as well. Mortgage borrowers who misrepresented their occupancy status performed worse than otherwise similar owner occupants and declared investors, defaulting at ...