Nonlinear Effects of Mortgage Spreads Over the Business Cycle

This paper provides robust evidence for the nonlinear effects of mortgage spread shocks during recessions and expansions in the United States. Estimating a smooth-transition vector autoregression (STVAR) model, we show that mortgage spread shocks hitting in a recessionary phase create significantly deeper and more protracted declines in consumption and housing market variables. In addition, we provide evidence that these mortgage spread shocks could be largely interpreted as credit supply shocks in the mortgage market. Our empirical results imply that unconventional monetary policy, such as the Federal Reserve's mortgage-backed security purchase program, would be a more effective tool for stabilizing the economy during recessions than in expansions.     

Housing, consumption and monetary policy: How different are the US and the euro area?

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the US and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices, residential investment and mortgage debt. It then presents evidence from Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) by focusing on the effects of monetary policy, credit supply and housing demand shocks on the housing market and the broader economy. The analysis shows that similarities outweigh differences as far as the housing market is concerned. The empirical evidence suggests a stronger role for housing in the transmission of monetary policy shocks in the US. The evidence is less clear-cut for housing demand shocks. Finally, credit supply shocks seem to matter more in the euro area.     

An International Perspective for Mortgage Market Reform

The United States and certain European countries (e.g., Ireland and Spain) have recently experienced serious distress in their residential mortgage markets. Public policy has responded with interventions to limit the deadweight costs of mortgage foreclosures, but with limited success. There are also open questions with respect to long‐term reforms in mortgage market structures. In this paper, I make use of the important differences that exist between U.S. and European mortgage markets to help identify those aspects of residential mortgage markets that are most in need of reform.     

A yield spread perspective on the great financial crisis: Break-point test evidence

We use a simple partial adjustment econometric framework to investigate the effects of financial crises on the dynamic properties of yield spreads. We find that crises manifest themselves in the form of substantial disruptions revealed by changes in the persistence of the shocks to spreads as much as by in their unconditional mean levels. Formal breakpoint tests confirm that in the U.S. the Great Financial Crisis has been over approximately since the Spring of 2009 and provide a conservative dating centered around the August 2007–June 2009 dates. However, some yield spread series point to an end of the most serious disruptions as early as in December 2008. Some symptoms of an impending crisis re-appear instead in the second half of 2011. We also uncover evidence that the LSAP program implemented by the Fed in the U.S. residential mortgage market has been effective, in the sense that the risk premia in this market have been uniquely shielded from the disruptive effects of the crisis.     

住房贷款违约风险定量分析初探

本首先剖析了影响住房贷款违约风险的主要因素，然后引入Merton的结构化模型来分析住房贷款在等额偿还方式下违约风险的度量问题，并从横向和纵向两个角度，通过模拟计算得出房价波动率和无风险利率对住房贷款的违约概率、预期损失和违约风险溢价的影响规律以及这三个指标在贷款期内的变化规律。     

Multiperiod Loans,Occasionally Binding Constraints,and Monetary Policy: A Quantitative Evaluation

We introduce multiperiod mortgage loans, fixed interest rate, a lower bound constraint on newly granted loans, and a possibly slack collateral constraint, in an otherwise standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with housing. Our nonlinear estimation shows that all those features are important to understand the evolution of mortgage debt during the recent U.S. housing market boom and bust. The transmission of monetary policy becomes dependent on the housing cycle, with weaker effects when house prices are high or start falling sharply. Higher average loan duration makes monetary policy less effective, eventually leading to asymmetric responses to positive and negative monetary shocks.     

Does easing monetary policy increase financial instability?

This paper develops a model featuring both a macroeconomic and a financial friction that speaks to the interaction between monetary and macro-prudential policy and to the role of US monetary and regulatory policy in the run up to the Subprime mortgage crisis. There are two main results. First, interest rate rigidities in a monopolistic banking system increase the probability of a financial crisis (relative to the case of flexible interest rate) in response to contractionary shocks to the economy, while they act as automatic macro-prudential stabilizers in response to expansionary shocks. Second, when the interest rate is the only available instrument, monetary policy faces a trade-off between macroeconomic and financial stability. This trade off is both qualitative and quantitative in response to contractionary shocks, while it is only quantitative in response to positive shocks. We show that a second instrument, such as a Pigouvian tax on credit to households on the demand side of the market, is needed to restore efficiency in the economy when both frictions are at work.     

Correlated leverage and its ramifications

This paper develops a theory in which housing prices, the capital structures of banks (mortgage lenders) and the capital structures of mortgage borrowers are all endogenously determined in equilibrium. There are four main results. First, leverage is a “positively correlated” phenomenon in that high leverage among borrowers is positively correlated with high leverage among banks, and higher house prices lead to higher leverage for both. The intuition is that first-time homebuyers with fixed wealth endowments must borrow more to buy more expensive homes, whereas higher current house prices rationally imply higher expected future house prices and therefore higher collateral values on bank loans, inducing banks to be more highly levered. Second, higher bank leverage leads to greater house price volatility in response to shocks to fundamental house values. Third, a bank’s exposure to credit risk depends not only on its own leverage but also on the leverage decisions of other banks. Fourth, positive fundamental shocks to house prices dilute financial intermediation by reducing banks’ pre-lending screening, and this reduction in bank screening further increases house prices. Empirical and policy implications of the analysis are drawn out, and empirical evidence is provided for the first two main results. The key policy implications are that greater geographic diversification by banks, tying mortgage tax exemptions to the duration of home ownership, and increasing bank capital requirements when borrower leverage is high can help reduce house price volatility.     

Infrequent Housing Adjustment,Limited Participation,and Monetary Policy

This paper asks why monetary contractions have strong effects on the housing market. The paper presents a model with staggered housing adjustment in which monetary policy has real effects in the absence of any rigidity in producer pricing or wages. Limited participation in financial markets leads to a rise in the real mortgage rate following an increase in the nominal short rate. Since households must take on a mortgage to consume housing, the rise in the real interest rate reduces the share of residential investment in output.     

An Early Assessment of Residential Mortgage Performance in China

The residential mortgage market becomes a financial engine for the booming residential housing development and sustained economic growth in China. Our study provides the first rigorous empirical analysis on the earlier performance of residential mortgage market in China based on a unique micro dataset of mortgage loan history collected from a major residential mortgage lender in China. We found that while the option theory fails to explain prepayment and default behavior in the residential mortgage market in China, other non-option theory related financial economic factors play major roles in determining the prepayment and default risks in China. We also found that borrower’s characteristics are significant in determining prepayment behavior, hence may be used as an effective tool for screening potential high risk borrowers in the loan origination process. Adopting a risk-based pricing in residential mortgage lending in China can improve the efficiency of the market, and enhance the credit availability to the most needed households, i.e., the younger households, blue-collar workers, lower income households, and help them become homeowners.     

Credit Frictions and Optimal Monetary Policy

The basic (representative-household) New Keynesian model of the monetary transmission mechanism is extended to allow for a spread between the interest rate available to savers and borrowers, and investigate the consequences of a variable credit spread for the effects of a variety of shocks, and for optimal policy responses to those shocks. A simple target criterion continues to provide a good approximation to optimal policy. Such a “flexible inflation target” can be implemented by a central-bank reaction function that is similar to a forward-looking Taylor rule, but adjusted for changes in current and expected future credit spreads.     

我国个人住房贷款利率合理水平探讨

本文从个人住房贷款利率水平影响因素角度入手，运用中美两国住房贷款利率水平比较的方法对我国当前的个人住房贷款的合理利率水平进行分析。得出了我国目前的个人住房贷款利率水平偏高的基本结论，认为我国商业银行拥有高于国外同行的超额利润，房贷存在“暴利”，我国浮动利率住房贷款利率水平合理的范围应当在4-5％左右。     

Loss given default of high loan-to-value residential mortgages

This paper studies loss given default using a large set of historical loan-level default and recovery data of high loan-to-value residential mortgages from several private mortgage insurance companies. We show that loss given default can largely be explained by various characteristics associated with the loan, the underlying property, and the default, foreclosure, and settlement process. We find that the current loan-to-value ratio is the single most important determinant. More importantly, mortgage loss severity in distressed housing markets is significantly higher than under normal housing market conditions. These findings have important policy implications for several key issues in Basel II implementation.     

The Impact of the 2007 Liquidity Shock on Bank Jumbo Mortgage Lending

This paper explores the consequences of the collapse of the private‐label residential mortgage‐backed securities market in 2007 on banks’ originations of jumbo mortgages. We show that jumbo lending declined by more at banks that were more dependent on this market and were less well capitalized. In contrast, banks that had little dependence on this market and were well capitalized increased jumbo originations. These findings highlight how dependence on the secondary market may cause amplification of financial shocks, and the potential value of capital requirements that are higher during periods of economic growth in mitigating the amplification effects.     

Housing Collateral and Entrepreneurship

We show that collateral constraints restrict firm entry and postentry growth, using French administrative data and cross‐sectional variation in local house‐price appreciation as shocks to collateral values. We control for local demand shocks by comparing treated homeowners to controls in the same region that do not experience collateral shocks: renters and homeowners with an outstanding mortgage, who (in France) cannot take out a second mortgage. In both comparisons, an increase in collateral value leads to a higher probability of becoming an entrepreneur. Conditional on entry, treated entrepreneurs use more debt, start larger firms, and remain larger in the long run.     

A quantitative analysis of oil-price shocks, systematic monetary policy, and economic downturns

Are the recessionary consequences of oil-price shocks due to oil-price shocks themselves or to the monetary policy that responds to them? We investigate this question in a calibrated general equilibrium model in which oil use is tied to capital utilization. The response to an oil-price shock is examined under a variety of monetary policy specifications. Under our benchmark calibration, which approximates the Federal Reserve's behavior since 1979, monetary policy contributes about 40 percent to the drop in output following a rise in oil prices. Moreover, none of the commonly proposed policies we examine completely offsets the recessionary consequences of oil shocks.     

Employment in the Great Recession: How Important Were Household Credit Supply Shocks?

I pool data from all large multimarket lenders in the United States to estimate how many of the over 7 million jobs lost in the Great Recession can be explained by reductions in the supply of mortgage credit. I construct a mortgage credit supply instrument at the county level, the weighted average (by prerecession mortgage market shares) of liquidity-driven lender shocks during the recession. The reduction in mortgage supply explains about 15% of the employment decline. The job losses are concentrated in construction and finance.     

基于借款人保护视角的住房按揭贷款业务分析

文章在揭示住房按揭贷款的内涵与本质的基础上,总结出现阶段我国住房按揭贷款业务中借款人面临的主要问题有:开发商虚假承诺为业主办理按揭贷款、商业银行实施强制保险问题、商业贷款与公积金贷款问题、等额本金还款法与等额本息还款法的利息负担等。针对这些问题产生的原因以及影响,文章从保护借款人的角度分别提出相应的对策建议,包括:保费应与贷款余额同步减少,购房者应事前了解商业银行拒贷原因,购房者应结合自身的投资能力选择还款方式,人民银行应进一步明确对提前还贷违约金的规定等。     

Capital Inflows and the U.S. Housing Boom

We estimate an open‐economy vector autoregressive (VAR) model to study the effect of capital‐inflow shocks on the U.S. housing market. We look at different external shocks that generate capital inflows to the U.S., in particular “saving‐glut” shocks and foreign monetary‐policy expansions. The shocks are identified with theoretically robust sign restrictions derived from an open‐economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. Our findings suggest that capital inflows that result from “saving‐glut” shocks have a positive and persistent effect on real house prices and real residential investment.     

Macroeconomic News and Mortgage Rates

The study analyzes the influence of macroeconomic news announcements on (a) interest rates for commercial mortgages, residential mortgages, 10-year Treasury notes, and Baa-rated corporate bonds; and (b) corresponding mortgage spreads. It is both interesting and highly relevant from a policy and portfolio management standpoint to examine the implications of the influence of macroeconomic news announcements on mortgage markets. Some important results are reported. First, consistent with the notion of market integration, mortgage rates are found to be co-integrated with other capital market instruments. Second, of the 22 types of periodic macroeconomic news releases considered, 13 of them have a significant influence on at least one of the interest rates, and notably changes in hourly earnings and housing starts significantly influence all debt-security yields. More generally, macroeconomic news that conveys higher inflation and/or economic growth has a positive influence on mortgage and other interest rates. Finally, this study finds several announcements including durable goods orders, new home sales, personal consumption, non-farm payroll, trade balance and Treasury budget to have a significant influence on mortgage spreads.