Tag Archives: financial innovation

The Miraculous Continuous Workout Mortgage

Posted on by

Professor Robert Shiller

Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller et al. have posted Continuous Workout Mortgages: Efficient Pricing and Systemic Implications to SSRN. The paper opens,

The ad hoc measures taken to resolve the subprime crisis involved expending financial resources to bail out banks without addressing the wave of foreclosures. These short-term amendments negate parts of mortgage contracts and question the disciplining mechanism of finance. Moreover, the increase in volatility of house prices in recent years exacerbated the crisis. In contrast to ad hoc approaches, we propose a mortgage contract, the Continuous Workout Mortgage (CWM), which is robust to downturns. We demonstrate how CWMs can be offered to homeowners as an ex ante solution to non-anticipated real estate price declines.

The Continuous Workout Mortgage (CWM, Shiller (2008b)) is a two-in-one product: a fixed rate home loan coupled with negative equity insurance. More importantly its payments are linked to home prices and adjusted downward when necessary to prevent negative equity. CWMs eliminate the expensive workout of defaulting on a plain vanilla mortgage. This subsequently reduces the risk exposure of financial institutions and thus the government to bailouts. CWMs share the price risk of a home with the lender and thus provide automatic adjustments for changes in home prices. This feature eliminates the rational incentive to exercise the costly option to default which is embedded in the loan contract. Despite sharing the underlying risk, the lender continues to receive an uninterrupted stream of monthly payments. Moreover, this can occur without multiple and costly negotiations. (1, references omitted)

If it is not obvious, this is a radical idea.  It was not even contemplated before the financial crisis. That being said, it is pretty brilliant financial innovation, one that should not just be discussed by academics. The paper provides a lot more detail about the proposal for those who are interested. And if you want to avoid taxpayer bailouts of the housing market in the future, you should be interested.

First-Time Homebuyers, You’re Okay

Posted on by

Couple Looking at Home

Saty Patrabansh of the Office of Policy Analysis and Research at the Federal Housing Finance Agency has posted a working paper, The Marginal Effect of First-Time Homebuyer Status on Mortgage Default and Prepayment.

While this is a dry read, it yields a pretty important insight for first-time homebuyers: you’re okay, just the way you are! The abstract reads,

This paper examines the loan performance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac first-time homebuyer mortgages originated from 1996 to 2012. First-time homebuyer mortgages generally perform worse than repeat homebuyer mortgages. But first-time homebuyers are younger and have lower credit scores, home equity, and income than repeat homebuyers, and therefore are comparatively less likely to withstand financial stress or take advantage of financial innovations available in the market. The distributional make-up of first-time homebuyers is different than that of repeat homebuyers in terms of many borrower, loan, and property characteristics that can be determined at the time of loan origination. Once these distributional differences are accounted for in an econometric model, there is virtually no difference between the average first-time and repeat homebuyers in their probabilities of mortgage default. Hence, the difference between the first-time and repeat homebuyer mortgage defaults can be attributed to the difference in the distributional make-up of the two groups and not to the premise that first-time homebuyers are an inherently riskier group. However, there appears to be an inherent difference in the prepayment probabilities of first-time and repeat homebuyers holding borrower, loan, and property characteristics constant. First-time homebuyers are less likely to prepay their mortgages compared to repeat homebuyers even after accounting for the distributional make-up of the two groups using information known at the time of loan origination.

So, just to be clear, being a first-time homebuyer is not inherently risky. Rather, the risks arising from transactions involving first-time homebuyers are the same as those involving repeat homebuyers:  loan characteristics, property characteristics and other borrower characteristics.

No Action on Financial Innovation?

Posted on by

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a Request for Comment on a proposed policy regarding No-Action Letters. Under the proposed policy, the Bureau could

issue no-action letters (NALs) to specific applicants in instances involving innovative financial products or services that promise substantial consumer benefit where there is substantial uncertainty whether or how specific provisions of statutes or regulations implemented by the Bureau would be applied (for example if, because of intervening technological developments, the application of statutes and regulations to a new project is novel and complicated). The Policy is also designed to enhance compliance with applicable federal consumer financial laws. (79 F.R. 62119)

The notice goes on,

The Bureau recognizes that, in certain circumstances, some may perceive that the current regulatory framework may hinder the development of innovative financial products that promise substantial consumer benefit because, for example, existing laws and rules did not contemplate such products. In such circumstances, it may be substantially uncertain whether or how specific provisions of certain statutes and regulations should be applied to such a product—and thus whether the federal agency tasked with administering those portions of a statute or regulation may bring an enforcement or supervisory action against the developer of the product for failure to comply with those laws. Such regulatory uncertainty may discourage innovators from entering a market, or make it difficult for them to develop suitable products or attract sufficient investment or other support.

Federal agencies can reduce such regulatory uncertainty in a variety of ways. For example, an agency may clarify the application of its statutes and regulations to the type of product in question—by rulemaking or by the issuance of less formal guidance. Alternatively, an agency may provide some form of notification that it does not intend to recommend initiation of an enforcement or supervisory action against an entity based on the application of specific identified provisions of statutes or regulations to its offering of a particular product. This proposal is concerned with the latter means of reducing regulatory uncertainty in limited circumstances. (79 F.R. 62119)

This notice certainly identifies a problem inherent in the complex regulatory state we live in — heavy regulation can impede innovation. It is a good thing to try to address that problem, but it is far from certain how effective a No Action regime will be in that regard. It is hard to imagine that it could do any harm though, so it is certainly a reasonable step to take.

Your thoughts? Comments are due December 15th, so get crackin’!

Shiller on Primitive Housing Finance

Posted on by

Robert Shiller has posted Why Is Housing Finance Still Stuck in Such a Primitive Stage? The abstract for this brief discussion paper reads:

The institutions for financing owner-occupied housing have not progressed as they should, and the financial innovation that has followed the financial crisis of 2007-9 has not been focused on improving the risk management of individual homeowners. This paper lists a number of barriers to housing finance innovation, and in light of these barriers, the problems of some major innovations of the past and future: self-amortizing mortgages, price-level adjusted mortgages (PLAMs), shared appreciation mortgages (SAMs), housing partnerships, and continuous workout mortgages (CWMs). (1)

The paper is more of an outline than a fleshed out argument, but it has some interesting points (and not just because the author recently won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics).  They include

  • Shared appreciation mortgages (SAMs), which offered some risk management of home price appreciation, were offered by the Bank of Scotland and Bear Stearns in the 1990s, but acquired a damaged reputation with the boom in home prices. U.K. homeowners who took such mortgages, and lost out on the speculative gains, were so angered that they filed a class-action lawsuit against the issuers. The suit was dropped, but the reputation loss was permanent. (5)

  • There has been some questioning of the assumption that insuring homeowners against a decline in home value is a good thing. Sinai and Soulelis (2014) have written that the existing  mortgage institutions may be close to optimal given that people want to live in their house forever, or move to a similar house whose price is correlated with the present house, and so are perfectly hedged. But their paper cannot be exactly right, given the sense of distress that homeowners are experiencing who are underwater. They are more certainly not right about all homeowners, many of whom actually plan to sell their home when they retire. (5-6)

  • The difficulties in making improvements in mortgage institutions have to do with the complexity of the risk management problem, coupled with mistrust of institutional players. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank Act and having authority over mortgages, among other things, seems oriented towards addressing complaints from the public, and has focused its attention so far on such things as unfair collection practices, bias against minorities, and excessive complexity of financial products being used to confuse customers. These are laudable concerns, but complaints that economists might register about the fundamental success of mortgage products to serve risk management well have not yet taken center stage. (6)

  • New Development economics, Karlan and Appel (2011), Bannerjee and Duflo (2012) has shown how carefully controlled experiments can reveal solid steps to take regarding new financial institutions for poverty reduction. The same methods could be used to improve mortgage institutions, as well as rental, leasing, partnership and cooperative institutions, in advanced countries. (7)

These are just brief thoughts. It will be interesting to see how Shiller develops them further.