We investigated whether in recent years banks have increased their holdings of securities at the expense of their holdings of business loans in response to shortfalls of their capital relative to risk-weighted capital standards and relative to a capital standard that made no explicit allowance...

This paper develops a game-theoretic model of mortgage securitization, which is then used to examine a potential effect of automated underwriting. The paper's primary supposition is that automated underwriting lowers the costs to competitive mortgage originators and a monopolist securitizer of...

The housing-related government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have an ambiguous relationship with the federal government. Most purchasers of the GSEs' debt securities believe that this debt is implicitly backed by the U.S. government despite the lack of a legal basis for...

We derive a theoretical model of how jumbo and conforming mortgage rates are determined and how the jumbo-conforming spread might arise. We show that mortgage rates reflect the cost of funding mortgages and that this cost of funding can drive a wedge between jumbo and conforming rates. Further,...