Why don’t lenders renegotiate more home mortgages? The effect of securitization

Securitization does not explain the reluctance among lenders to renegotiate home mortgages. We focus on seriously delinquent borrowers from 2005 through the third quarter of 2008 and show that servicers renegotiate similarly small fractions of securitized and portfolio loans. The results are robust to several different definitions of renegotiation and hold in subsamples where unobserved heterogeneity is likely to be small. We argue that information issues endemic to home mortgages where lenders negotiate with large numbers of borrowers lead to barriers to renegotiation fundamentally different from those present with other types of debt.