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Discussion Paper
Why are Adjustable Rate Mortgages So Rare These Days?
The fraction of mortgage borrowers who choose an adjustable-rate loan has fallen significantly over the past five years or so. Although the fraction edged up slightly in 2010, it remains close to historic lows, with less than 10 percent of mortgage originations since 2009 featuring an adjustable interest rate. What explains the striking decline? And what are its implications for borrowers and policymakers?
Journal Article
Consumer guide to nontraditional mortgages published
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 ...
Journal Article
Why is the market share of adjustable-rate mortgages so low?
Over the past several years, U.S. homebuyers have increasingly favored fixed-rate mortgages over adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Indeed, ARMs have dropped to less than 10 percent of all residential mortgage originations, a near-record low. One might speculate that the decline in the ARM share has been driven by ?one-off? factors relating to the financial crisis. However, a statistical analysis suggests that recent trends can largely be explained by the same factors that have historically shaped mortgage choice?most notably, the term structure of interest rates and its effects on the ...
Journal Article
Call to ARMS
Journal Article
Fed publishes revised handbook on adjustable rate mortgages
Underscoring banking regulators' concerns about the growing use of nontraditional mortgages, the Consumer Handbook on Adjustable-Rate Mortgages has undergone one of its most substantial revisions since its 1987 publication.
Working Paper
The termination of subprime hybrid and fixed rate mortgages
Adjustable rate and hybrid loans have been a large and important component of subprime lending in the mortgage market. While maintaining the familiar 30-year term the typical adjustable rate loan in subprime is designed as a hybrid of fixed and adjustable characteristics. In its most prevalent form, the first two years are typically fixed and the remaining 28 years adjustable. Perhaps not surprisingly, using a competing risks proportional hazard framework that also accounts for unobserved heterogeneity, hybrid loans are sensitive to rising interest rates and tend to temporarily terminate at ...
Working Paper
The Mortgage Cash Flow Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission: A Tale of Two Countries
We study the mortgage cash flow channel of monetary policy transmission under fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) versus adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) regimes by comparing the United States with primarily long-term FRMs and Spain with primarily ARMs that automatically reset annually. We find a robust transmission of mortgage rate changes to spending in both countries but surprisingly a larger effect in the United States—and provide two explanations for this finding. First, there are channels of transmission other than the mortgage cash flow effect since other interest rates co-move with the mortgage ...
Journal Article
Alternatives to Libor in consumer mortgages
Many adjustable rate mortgages in the United States are indexed to Libor. While the accuracy of this rate has recently been called into question, another issue affecting U.S. borrowers has become evident since the onset of the financial crisis. Specifically, many U.S. consumers with Libor-based loans may have been hit with substantially higher payments when their loans reset during the financial crisis than if those loans had been tied to a Treasury rate. We investigate several alternative reference rates for consumer loans and estimate their payment effects on a large sample of Libor-linked ...