Optimal Stopping and Losses on Subprime Mortgages

Optimal Stopping and Losses on Subprime Mortgages

Lender losses on mortgage loans arise from a two-stage process. In the first stage, the borrower stops making payments if and when default is optimal. The second stage is a lengthy and costly period during which the lender employs legal remedies to obtain possession and execute a sale of the collateral. This research uses data on subprime mortgage losses to explore the role of borrower and coll...

Subprime Outcomes: Risky Mortgages, Homeownership Experiences, and Foreclosures

The Canary in the Coal Mine: Subprime Mortgages, Mortgage-Backed Securities, and the US Housing Bust

Introduction Recent events in the residential mortgage industry have verified what many of us expected all along: that the bursting of the housing bubble is already exerting dramatic and wide-ranging pressure on the US economy. As the housing market continues to decline, consumer spending will contract and financial institutions will suffer as housingrelated financing instruments take the plunge.

Elementary Proofs on Optimal Stopping

Abstract Elementary proofs of classical theorems on pricing perpetual call and put options in the standard Black-Scholes model are given. The method presented does not rely on stochastic calculus and is also applied to give prices and optimal stopping rules for perpetual call options when the stock is driven by a Lévy process with no positive jumps, and for perpetual put options for stocks driv...

Optimal Strategy for Prepayment of Mortgages