Observed mortgage prepayment and default rates have been far different than the ruthless option exercise rates predicted by contingent claims models of mortgage pricing. The discrepancies have been attributed to both the competing-risk nature of prepayment and default and to transactions costs....

An empirical analysis of macroeconomic time series from the mortgage, housing, capital and labor markets is based on life-cycle consumption and mortgage option pricing considerations. Vector autoregression techniques characterize the long-run equilibrium and short-run dynamics of the mortgage...

The Boston Federal Reserve study (Munnell et al. 1996) concluded that illegal discrimination is a statistically significant contributor to the observed gap between white and minority residential-mortgage rejection rates. The Boston study speculated that discrimination arises because lenders do...