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Working Paper
The Mortgage Prepayment Decision: Are There Other Motivations Beyond Refinance and Move?
Borrowers terminate residential mortgages for a variety of reasons. Prepayments and defaults have always been distinguishable, and researchers have recently distinguished between prepayments involving a move and other prepayments. But these categories still combine distinct decisions. For example, a borrower may refinance to obtain a lower interest rate or to borrow a larger amount. By matching mortgage servicing and credit bureau records, we are able to distinguish among several motivations for prepayment: simple refinancing, cash-out refinancing, mortgage payoff, and move. Using multinomial ...
Working Paper
The Behavioral Relationship Between Mortgage Prepayment and Default
An implication of the dual trigger theory of default is that mortgage borrowers who experience an unexpected financial reverse will prepay their mortgage rather than default if their equity in the house is positive. We test this idea with a new data set created by matching mortgage servicing records and credit bureau records to classify prepayments by what happens subsequently. In particular, we can identify a subset of prepayments that seems consistent with the dual trigger theory. If the theory is correct, these prepayments should exhibit similarities to defaults in the data set rather than ...