In assessing the riskiness of a mortgage loan, one of the primary underwriting criteria used by lenders and one of the macro-prudential measures used by policy makers is the LTV ratio at the time of origination. This ratio is critical because it determines the probability of a default and the...

In this paper, we empirically examine differences in subprime borrower default decisions by Census tract characteristics in order to clarify how the subprime foreclosure crisis played out in minority areas. An innovation in our modeling approach is that we do not constrain the impact of...