Vincent W. Yao

Collateral Valuation and Borrower Financial Constraints: Evidence from the Residential Real Estate Market

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged transactions, around critical leverage thresholds, and for transactions mediated through a broker. Mortgages with inflated valuations default more often. Lenders account for 60%-90% of the bias through pricing. This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.

Why Do Borrowers Make Mortgage Refinancing Mistakes

Refinancing a mortgage is often one of the biggest and most important financial decisions that people make. Borrowers need to choose the interest rate differential at which to refinance and, when that differential is reached, they need to take the steps to refinance before rates change again. The optimal differential is where the interest saved by refinancing equals the sum of refinancing costs and the option value of refinancing. Using a unique panel data set, we find that approximately 59% of borrowers refinance sub-optimally – with 52% of the sample making errors of commission (choosing the wrong rate), 17% making errors of omission (waiting too long to refinance), and 10% making both errors. Financially sophisticated borrowers make smaller mistakes, refinancing at rates closer to the optimal rate and waiting less after mortgage rates reach the borrowers’ trigger rates. Evidence suggests borrowers learn from their refinancing experiences as they make smaller mistakes on their second refinancing than on their first one.

Collateral pledge, sunk-cost fallacy and mortgage default

Individuals and firms pledge collateral to mitigate agency costs or contracting frictions in a world with asymmetric information. However, the option value theory suggests that once the mark-to-market asset valuation is below the current debt, the firms and individuals should default on their debt contract irrespective of the initial collateral pledged. In this paper, we estimate default models and find that after controlling for mark-to-market asset valuation, initial collateral remains an important predictor of mortgage default. Specifically, individuals that pledge higher collateral have a lower hazard to default. Our results are consistent with models of sunk cost fallacy.

Mortgage Refinancing, Consumer Spending, and Competition: Evidence from the Home Affordable Refinancing Program

Using loan-level mortgage data merged with consumer credit records, we examine the ability of the government to impact mortgage refinancing activity and spur consumption by focusing on the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). The policy relaxed housing equity constraints by extending government credit guarantee on insufficiently collateralized mortgages refinanced by intermediaries. Difference-in-difference tests based on program eligibility criteria reveal a significant increase in refinancing activity by HARP. More than three million eligible borrowers with primarily fixed-rate mortgages refinanced under HARP, receiving an average reduction of 1.45% in interest rate that amounts to

Systematic Mistakes in the Mortgage Market and Lack of Financial Sophistication

3,000 in annual savings. Durable spending by borrowers increased significantly after refinancing and regions more exposed to the program saw a relative increase in non-durable and durable consumer spending, a decline in foreclosure rates, and faster recovery in house prices. A variety of identification strategies suggest that competitive frictions in the refinancing market partly hampered the program’s impact: the take-up rate and annual savings among those who refinanced were reduced by 10% to 20%. These effects were amplified for the most indebted borrowers, the key target of the program. These findings have implications for future policy interventions, pass-through of monetary policy through household balance-sheets and design of the mortgage market.

Who Bears the Pen? Relative Income and Gender Gap in Mortgage Signing Order

Institutions often offer a menu of contracts to consumers in an attempt to create a separating equilibrium that reveals borrower types and provides better pricing. We test the effectiveness of a specific set of contracts in the mortgage market: mortgage points. Points allow borrowers to exchange an upfront amount for a decrease in the mortgage rate. We document that, on average, points takers lose about

Financial Decision Making When Buying and Owning a Home

700. Also, points takers are less financially savvy (less educated, older), and they make mistakes on other dimensions (e.g., inefficiently refinancing their mortgages). Overall, our results show that borrowers overestimate how long they will stay with the mortgage.

Sales of Distressed Residential Property: What Have We Learned from Recent Research?

The major empirical challenge for estimating the driving force of the gender difference is theomitted variable bias because the proposed factor is usually intertwined with other observableand unobservable characteristics. This paper adopts a novel approach to tackle this identificationproblem and examines how the relative income defines gender roles in the context of mortgagesigning order. We first document that men sign first 89% of the time when a mixed-gendercouple applies for a housing loan. The signing order reflects purely behavioral preferences, asthere is no difference in the legal rights or obligations of either the first or second borrowers. Weshow that relative income is the major determinant of the observed gender gap in signing orderand we exclude other possible explanations such as discrimination, loan officer bias and socialnorms. To isolate relative income from differences in other dimensions, we compare the signingorder of the mixed- and same-gender couples and find that the effects of relative income not onlypersists but also are fairly comparable between the two groups. Finally, we provide consistentmacro-level evidences by both cross-sectional and dynamic analysis and show that gender gap insigning order is higher in states with larger gender wage gap and experiences a declining trendover time.This paper adopts a novel approach to examine the roles of gender difference and intra-household economic power in mortgage signing order. We develop an “economic power�? index based on relative economic power within the same-sex couple households. We then use this measure along with gender identity and other factors to explain signing order in different-gender couples. Our results suggest that, while pure economic power explains much of the observed signing order, gender difference plays an important role. Exploit regional variation reveals that gender difference in signing order is greater in states with a larger gender wage gap and red states whose residents predominantly vote for the Republican.

Financial Literacy and Mortgage Credit: Evidence from the Recent Mortgage Market Crisis

In this paper we investigate if financially sophisticated households, as measured by schooling and work experience, are less likely to make financial mistakes when buying and owning a home. Surprisingly, we find that financial sophistication does not have a uniform impact across households’ financial decisions. While sophisticated households are less likely to pay too high a mortgage rate and more likely to refinance when it is financially advantageous to do so, they are also more likely to over pay for a house and less likely to default when significantly underwater in their mortgages. We argue that some decisions, like purchasing a home or defaulting on a mortgage, are emotional decisions while others, like deciding on mortgage terms or when to refinance, are analytical decisions more amenable to the analyses that sophisticated households are able engage in. Consistent with this, we provide evidence that households learn over time to make better mortgage rate and refinancing decisions but not better house purchase price decisions.

The Political Economy of Loan Modification

During the housing bust many homeowners found themselves “underwater”—the amount they owed on their mortgages exceeded the value of the associated property—and they either could not or possibly chose not to stay current on their mortgage payments. As a consequence, sales of so-called distressed properties, often after a foreclosure, became commonplace. This spurred numerous research papers on various related issues. The authors’ review summarizes the research findings on three topics: the impact of changes in housing prices on foreclosures; the impact of foreclosure on the sales price of the foreclosed house; and the impact of foreclosure on the sales prices of nearby houses. Not surprisingly, declining housing prices are associated with increasing foreclosure rates; however, various other factors, such as a job loss or expected housing prices, can also play an important role. This review highlights various theoretical and econometric issues that have raised doubts about the accuracy of estimated price impacts of foreclosures and led to numerous refinements of the subsequent empirical analysis. Estimates of the own foreclosure discount generally range from near zero to 28 percent, with most estimates greater than 12 percent. Estimates of the discount resulting from spillover effects of nearby foreclosed houses are generally less than 2 percent and diminish rapidly with distance.