We exploit the OCC's preemption of national banks from state laws against predatory lending as a quasi-experiment to study the effect of deregulation and its interaction with competition on the supply of complex mortgages. Following the preemption ruling, national banks significantly increased...

We introduce a novel application of machine learning to compare the Pooling and Servicing Agreements (PSA) that govern asset-backed securities. The PSA is often viewed as mostly boilerplate legal text and thus may appear similar across deals despite heterogeneity in the underlying collateral and...

How do primary and secondary mortgage markets interact? This paper shows that funding shocks to mortgage originators interact with the degree of local credit market competition to increase lending growth. Specifically, I use a shift-share approach to estimate the causal effect of the growth in...

Abstract What hampered residential mortgage renegotiation in the wake of the financial crisis? I find that in the early years of the crisis investors expected to recover, on average, only about 2.2% of a mortgage's outstanding balance, relative to foreclosing upon the borrower. As the housing...

Servicers are less likely to renegotiate delinquent loans in residential MBS pools that are more deeply tranched. A one standard deviation increase in tranching corresponds to a 14 percent decrease in loan modification relative to the mean. In highly tranched pools, servicers pursue fewer...