Adverse Selection in a Model of Real Estate Lending

We provide a rationale for the presence of points in mortgage loan contracts. Our analysis builds on two key features. First, insurance markets are unavailable for labor income. Second, the “due-on-sale” clause allows banks to offer loan contracts which partially insure against fluctuations in labor income. If explicit prepayment penalties are prohibited by law, points serve effectively as prepayment penalties. We also examine environments where such penalties are not prohibited and show that points will be used if interest rates cannot depend on the size of the loan.     

住房抵押贷款提前还贷风险管理研究

从现代金融和风险管理角度看,住房抵押贷款提前还贷对商业银行是一种期权性风险,对其收取违约金并非国际惯例,也并不是有效的风险补偿方式。商业银行应适应市场竞争需要,接受风险转嫁并提供风险管理服务,运用风险定价技术在按揭交易价格中对提前还贷风险进行补偿。对于已承担的风险,商业银行应构建抵押贷款提前还贷的数据库,通过表内对冲和市场对冲,推出多样化的住房抵押贷款方式,积极推进住房抵押贷款证券化,从而最终增强银行的盈利来源和核心竞争力。     

An empirical analysis of home equity loan and line performance

Given the growth in home equity lending during the 1990s, it is imperative that lenders and regulators understand the risks associated with this segment of the residential mortgage market. Using a unique panel data set of over 135,000 homeowners with second mortgages, our analysis indicates that significant differences exist in the prepayment and default probabilities of home equity loans and lines, providing insights into bank minimum capital requirements. We find that households with equity loans are relatively more sensitive to changes in interest rates. By contrast, households with equity lines are more sensitive to appreciation in property value.     

What Drives Default and Prepayment on Subprime Auto Loans?

This paper uses novel data on the performance of loan pools underlying asset-backed securities to estimate a competing risks model of default and prepayment on subprime automobile loans. We find that prepayment rates increase rapidly with loan age but are not affected by prevailing market interest rates. Default rates are much more sensitive to aggregate shocks than are prepayment rates. Increases in unemployment precede increases in default rates, suggesting that defaults on subprime automobile loans are driven largely by shocks to household liquidity. There are significant differences in the default and prepayment rates faced by different subprime lenders. Those lenders that charge the highest interest rates experience the highest default rates, but also experience somewhat lower prepayment rates. We conjecture that there is substantial heterogeneity among subprime borrowers, and that different lenders target different segments of the subprime market. Because of their higher default rates, loans that carry the highest interest rates do not appear to yield the highest expected returns.     

Analyses of Mortgage-Backed Securities Based on Unobservable Prepayment Cost Processes

We propose a prepayment model of mortgage based on a structural approach in order to analyze prepayment risk of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). We introduce a continuous process named prepayment cost process. Specifically, each mortgager's prepayment time is defined by the first time when her or his prepayment cost process falls below zero, but prepayment cost processes are supposed to be unobservable in the market. We also introduce a risk unique to each loan pool of mortgages, called a loan pool risk (LPR), and we regard LPR as a systematic risk other than interest rate. Using the model, we discuss the conditional distribution of prepayment times and a risk-neutral valuation of pass-through MBS. It is shown that each mortgager's conditional non-prepayment probability and the posterior distribution of LPR play quite important roles in our study.This research is partially supported by Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) No. 16710108 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.     

Time-Varying Mortgage Prepayment Penalties

Recent empirical findings reveal that prepayment decisions of commercial property owners are slower than predicted by the pure options-pricing model (OPM). Borrower decisions appearing slow, however, may be quite rational when prepayment penalties of a time-varying nature are incorporated into the OPM. This article uses a competing risks OPM, adjusted for each of four different categories of prepayment penalties, to analyze borrower prepayment behavior. We find the value of delaying prepayment is often higher for mortgages with declining-rate penalties than for mortgages with static-rate penalties, frequently requiring a substantially higher interest rate spread to trigger a refinance. Multifamily loan prepayment records reveal the type of prepayment pattern that the adjusted OPM indicate should occur, reducing the gap between empirical findings and theoretical predictions. The results have implications for the specification of regressions fit to historical data, for the pricing of newly originated commercial mortgages, and for pricing in the single-family market where prepayment penalties are reemerging.     

Private information and incentives: Implications for mortgage contract terms and pricing

We examine the linkage in equilibrium among (1) contract design; (2) expected prepayment and default likelihoods; and (3) the pricing of mortgage contracts by focusing upon the effects of the borrower's private information at the time of contracting. We examine the implications of these perspectives upon the empirical analysis of prepayment behavior and use the framework to examine the predominance of long-term mortgage contracts in the United States. We consider examples that explore the trade-offs between fixed and adjustable rate instruments, assumable and due-on-sale loans, and contract interest rates and initial discounts (points).     

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.     

Household Income, Termination Risk and Mortgage Pricing

The premium embedded in home mortgage loans to compensate investors for their exposure to prepayment risk is a significant component of the cost of home mortgage lending. Moreover, there is some reason to believe that prepayment risk may be lower for loans to lower-income housing borrowers, especially those that are first-time home owners. If so, investor recognition of this advantage should facilitate greater willingness to acquire portfolios of lower-income housing loans, and encourage more competitive pricing in this segment of the market. This study investigates the possibility of differential mortgage prepayment behavior between lower-income home owners and non-low income home owners. The investigation relies on samples of the American Housing Survey spanning ten years of experience from 1985 to 1995. We find no significant difference between the termination or refinancing behavior of non-low income and low-income households. This result is robust to a number of alternative specifications such as restricting the low-income test group to non-moving households and to first-time owners. The same conclusions are derived from both aggregate prepayment rates and from analysis of individual household prepayment behavior.     

How does competition affect bank risk-taking?

A common assumption in the academic literature and in the supervision of banking systems is that franchise value plays a key role in limiting bank risk-taking. As market power is the primary source of franchise value, reduced competition in banking markets has been seen as promoting banking stability. A recent paper by Martínez-Miera and Repullo (MMR, 2010) shows that a nonlinear relationship theoretically exists between bank competition and risk-taking in the loan market. We test this hypothesis using data from the Spanish banking system. After controlling for macroeconomic conditions and bank characteristics, we find support for this nonlinear relationship using standard measures of market concentration in both the loan and deposit markets. When direct measures of market power, such as Lerner indices, are used, the empirical results are more supportive of the original franchise value hypothesis, but only in the loan market. Overall, the results highlight the empirical relevance of the MMR model, even though further analysis across other banking markets is needed.     

Is the Corporate Loan Market Globally Integrated? A Pricing Puzzle

We offer evidence that interest rate spreads on syndicated loans to corporate borrowers are economically significantly smaller in Europe than in the United States, other things equal. Differences in borrower, loan, and lender characteristics do not appear to explain this phenomenon. Borrowers overwhelmingly issue in their natural home market and bank portfolios display home bias. This may explain why pricing discrepancies are not competed away, though their causes remain a puzzle. Thus, important determinants of loan origination market outcomes remain to be identified, home bias appears to be material for pricing, and corporate financing costs differ across Europe and the United States.     

我国民营企业贷款的距离影响因素分析

选取我国2011年沪深两市 A股的628家民营上市企业的贷款数据为样本进行实证分析发现：银行贷款量与银行到企业之间距离具有显著的负相关关系,说明银企距离是制约我国民营企业贷款的一个重要影响因素;地区金融发展与企业的银行贷款量之间具有显著的负相关的关系,说明了竞争关系对企业外地银行贷款的抑制作用不是表现在区域的银行网点的竞争,而是地区的金融发展。因此,应重视银企距离,加大地区金融发展。     

Bank Competition and Financial Stability

Under the traditional “competition-fragility” view, more bank competition erodes market power, decreases profit margins, and results in reduced franchise value that encourages bank risk taking. Under the alternative “competition-stability” view, more market power in the loan market may result in higher bank risk as the higher interest rates charged to loan customers make it harder to repay loans, and exacerbate moral hazard and adverse selection problems. The two strands of the literature need not necessarily yield opposing predictions regarding the effects of competition and market power on stability in banking. Even if market power in the loan market results in riskier loan portfolios, the overall risks of banks need not increase if banks protect their franchise values by increasing their equity capital or engaging in other risk-mitigating techniques. We test these theories by regressing measures of loan risk, bank risk, and bank equity capital on several measures of market power, as well as indicators of the business environment, using data for 8,235 banks in 23 developed nations. Our results suggest that—consistent with the traditional “competition-fragility” view—banks with a higher degree of market power also have less overall risk exposure. The data also provides some support for one element of the “competition-stability” view—that market power increases loan portfolio risk. We show that this risk may be offset in part by higher equity capital ratios.

Predicting Prepayment and Default Risks of Unsecured Consumer Loans in Online Lending

Online lending provides a means of fast financing for borrowers based on their creditworthiness. However, borrowers may undermine this agreement due to early repayment or default, which are two major concerns for the platform and lenders, since both affect the profitability of a loan. While default risk is frequently focused on credit scoring literature, prepayment has received much less attention, despite a higher prepayment rate being observed in online lending when compared with default. This article uses multivariate logistic regression to predict the probability of both the underlying prepayment and default risks. Real consumer lending data of 140,605 unsecured loans provides evidence that these two events have their own distinct patterns. We consider systemic risk by incorporating macroeconomic factors in modeling and address the influence of economic conditions, which are lessons learnt from the last financial crisis. The out-of-sample validation has shown that both prepayment and default can be accurately predicted. This article highlights the necessity of regulations on prepayment given the fast growing online lending market.     

Product Market Imperfections and Loan Commitments

I show in a model of competitive banks that the characteristics of loan contracts are affected by product market imperfections in the borrower's industry. A bank loan commitment increases the value of a borrower firm operating in an imperfectly competitive industry and thus dominates a simple loan even in the absence of risk sharing considerations and informational asymmetries between the borrower and the bank. While it is individually rational for a firm to obtain a loan commitment, all the firms in that industry taken together are made worse off by the existence of loan commitments.     

The Impact of SFAS No. 114 on the Linear Information Dynamic for Commercial Banks

Increase (decrease) in loan loss provisions would decrease (increases) bank earnings, but increase (decreases) regulatory capital. Previous studies have separately documented earnings and capital management behavior via loan loss provisions by commercial banks. However, it is difficult to isolate a bank's demand for increasing earnings from its demand for regulatory capital because earnings is a source of capital. Based on the objective bank function, this study investigates the impact of SFAS No. 114 on the information content of loan loss provisions in relation to both earnings quality and capital adequacy in a linear information dynamic framework. Test results show that the association between market value with loan loss provisions became significantly stronger for commercial banks in the post- than in the pre-adoption period. As a result, SFAS No. 114 is also found to positively affect the association of market value with both bank earnings and regulatory capital through the clean surplus relation because of the higher value relevance of loan loss provisions. The findings thus provide empirical evidence that SFAS No. 114 has significantly complemented banking regulations in enhancing (reducing) the (dispersion from the) accounting measurement construct of loan loss provisions.     

Bank portfolio choice with private information about loan quality: Theory and implications for regulation

This paper models bank asset choice when shareholders know more about loan quality than do outsiders. Because of this informational asymmetry, the price of loans in the secondary market is the price for poor quality loans. Banks desire to hold marketable securities in order to avoid liquidating good quality loans at the ‘lemons’ price, but also have a countervailing desire to hold risky loans in order to maximize the value of deposit insurance. In this context, portfolio composition and bank safety is examined as a function of the market distribution of loan quality, and the distribution of deposits. The model suggests that off-balance sheet commitments have little effect on bankruptcy risk, and induce banks to hold more securities. We also show that an increase in the bank equity requirement will unambiguously increase bank safety in the long run. In the short run, banks are unambiguously riskier on-balance sheet, although the effect on bank safety is ambiguous.     

A general model of the banking firm under conditions of monopoly,uncertainty, and recourse

We develop a stochastic programming model of the monopolistic competition banking firm. It assumes the bank faces a downward-sloping loan demand curve and is a price taker in securities markets. Uncertainty and liquidity requirements are incorporated. Bank decisions are made within a two-stage framework where realized disturbances that violate constraints can be rectified ex post at a cost. The results are: (1) Optimal loan and deposit rates are positive functions of the recourse penalty. (2) Asset/liability decisions are interdependent and elastically supplied deposits lower the loan rate. (3) The effect of uncertainty depends upon the penalty rate level.     

The Informational Efficiency of the Equity Market As Compared to the Syndicated Bank Loan Market

The loan market is a hybrid between a public and a private market, comprised of financial institutions with access to private information about borrowing firms. We test whether this is reflected in informationally efficient price formation in the loan market vis-a-vis the equity markets, and reject this private information hypothesis. We also reject a liquidity hypothesis which suggests that equity markets always lead loan markets, despite bank lenders' access to private information, because of greater liquidity in equity markets. We further test, and reject, an asymmetric price reaction hypothesis that states that loan returns are more sensitive to negative information whereas equity returns respond symmetrically to both positive and negative information. We find evidence most consistent with an integrated markets hypothesis that suggests that both the equity and syndicated bank loan markets are highly integrated such that information flows freely across markets. This is particularly true when the equity market makers are also loan syndicate members.      

Firm Size Dependence in the Determinants of Bank Term Loan Maturity

Abstract:   We examine the hypothesis that firm size affects the sensitivity of bank term loan maturity to its underlying determinants. As borrower size increases, negotiating power with the lender and information transparency increase, while the lender is able to spread the fixed costs of loan production across a larger dollar value of the loan. We find strong evidence of firm size dependency in the determinants of bank term loan maturity and show that this is unrelated to syndication. Only large borrowers can manipulate bank loan contract terms so as to increase firm value.