Do Pre-Sale and Post-Sale Foreclosure Statutes Impact Foreclosure Starts?

Pre-sale information

In markets as diverse as that for specialized industrial equipment or that for retail financial services, sellers or intermediaries may earn profits both from the sale of products and from the provision of pre-sale consultation services. We study how a seller optimally chooses the costly quality of pre-sale information, next to the price of information and the product price, and obtain clear-cu...

Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention Efforts

Foreclosure and health status.

In 2009, more than 2.8 million housing units in the U.S. received a foreclosure notice. That represents about 1 in every 45 properties and a 120% increase in the number of foreclosed properties since 2007. Real estate experts predict even more foreclosures in 2010 as high unemployment continues. The cascading effects of the foreclosure crisis on the U.S. economy are all too clear; the effects o...

Vertical Integration and Market Foreclosure

Few people would disagree with the proposition that horizontal mergers have the potential to restrict output and raise consumer prices. In contrast, there is much less agreement about the anti-competitive effects of vertical mergers. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model showing how vertical integration changes the nature of competition in upstream and downstream markets a...

Foreclosure with Incomplete Information

We investigate the robustness of the new foreclosure doctrine and its associated welfare implications to the introduction of incomplete information. In particular, we let the upstream firm’s marginal cost be private information, unknown to the downstream firms. The previous literature has argued that vertical integration is harmful because it allows an upstream monopolist to limit output to mon...