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Author:Fuster, Andreas 

Discussion Paper
How Is Technology Changing the Mortgage Market?

The adoption of new technologies is transforming the mortgage industry. For instance, borrowers can now obtain a mortgage entirely online, and lenders use increasingly sophisticated methods to verify borrower income and assets. In a recent staff report, we present evidence suggesting that technology is reducing frictions in mortgage lending, such as reducing the time it takes to originate a mortgage, and increasing the elasticity of mortgage supply. These benefits do not seem to come at the cost of less careful screening of borrowers.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20180625

Working Paper
Insuring consumption using income-linked assets

Shiller (2003) and others have argued for the creation of financial instruments that allow households to insure risks associated with their lifetime labor income. In this paper, we argue that while the purpose of such assets is to smooth consumption across states of nature, one must also consider the assets' effects on households' ability to smooth consumption over time. We show that consumers in a realistically calibrated life-cycle model would generally prefer income-linked loans (with a rate positively correlated with income shocks) to an income-hedging instrument (a limited liability ...
Working Papers , Paper 10-1

Report
Securitization and the fixed-rate mortgage

Fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) dominate the U.S. mortgage market, with important consequences for monetary policy, household risk management, and financial stability. In this paper, we show that the share of FRMs is sharply lower when mortgages are difficult to securitize. Our analysis exploits plausibly exogenous variation in access to liquid securitization markets generated by a regulatory cutoff and time variation in private securitization activity. We interpret our findings as evidence that lenders are reluctant to retain the prepayment and interest rate risk embedded in FRMs. The form of ...
Staff Reports , Paper 594

Working Paper
The time-varying price of financial intermediation in the mortgage market

The U.S. mortgage market links homeowners with savers all over the world. In this paper, we ask how much of the flow of money from savers to borrowers actually goes to the intermediaries that facilitate these transactions. Based on a new methodology and a new administrative dataset, we find that the price of intermediation, measured as a fraction of the loan amount at origination, is large?142 basis points on average over the 2008?2014 period. At daily frequencies, intermediaries pass on the price changes in the secondary market to borrowers in the primary market almost completely. At monthly ...
Working Papers , Paper 16-28

Report
Regulation and risk shuffling in bank securities portfolios

Bank capital requirements are based on a mix of market values and book values. We investigate the effects of a policy change that ties regulatory capital to the market value of the ?available-for-sale" investment securities portfolio for some banking organizations. Our analysis is based on security-level data on individual bank portfolios matched to bond characteristics. We find little clear evidence that banks respond by reducing the riskiness of their securities portfolios, although there is some evidence of a greater use of derivatives to hedge securities exposures. Instead, banks respond ...
Staff Reports , Paper 851

Report
What would you do with $500? Spending responses to gains, losses, news, and loans

We use survey questions about spending to investigate features of propensities to consume that are useful for distinguishing between consumption theories. Asking households about their intended spending under various scenarios, we find that 1) responses to unanticipated gains are vastly heterogeneous (either zero or substantially positive), 2) responses to losses are much larger and more widespread than responses to gains, and 3) even those with large responses to gains do not respond to news about future gains. These three findings suggest that limited access to disposable resources is an ...
Staff Reports , Paper 843

Report
Understanding mortgage spreads

Most mortgages in the U.S. are securitized in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Yield spreads on these securities are thus a key determinant of homeowners? funding costs. We study variation in MBS spreads over time and across securities, and document a cross-sectional smile pattern in MBS spreads with respect to the securities? coupon rates. We propose non-interest-rate prepayment risk as a candidate driver of MBS spread variation and present a new pricing model that uses ?stripped? MBS prices to identify the contribution of this prepayment risk to the spread. The pricing model finds ...
Staff Reports , Paper 674

Discussion Paper
Payment size, negative equity, and mortgage default

Surprisingly little is known about the importance of mortgage payment size for default, as efforts to measure the treatment effect of rate increases or loan modifications are confounded by borrower selection. We study a sample of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages that have experienced large rate reductions over the past years and are largely immune to these selection concerns. We show that interest rate changes dramatically affect repayment behavior. Our estimates imply that cutting a borrower?s payment in half reduces his hazard of becoming delinquent by about two-thirds, an effect that is ...
Public Policy Discussion Paper , Paper 12-10

Report
The rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that the firms experienced and the events that ultimately led the government to take action in an effort to stabilize housing and financial markets. We describe the various resolution options available to policymakers at the time and evaluate the success of the choice of conservatorship, and other actions ...
Staff Reports , Paper 719

Working Paper
How Resilient Is Mortgage Credit Supply? Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

We study the evolution of US mortgage credit supply during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the mortgage market experienced a historic boom in 2020, we show there was also a large and sustained increase in intermediation markups that limited the pass-through of low rates to borrowers. Markups typically rise during periods of peak demand, but this historical relationship explains only part of the large increase during the pandemic. We present evidence that pandemic-related labor market frictions and operational bottlenecks contributed to unusually inelastic credit supply, and that ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-20

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