This paper studies the impact of transparency in the mortgage market on the underlying real estate markets. We show that geographic transparency in the secondary mortgage market, which implies geographic risk based pricing in the primary market, can limit risk-sharing and make house prices more...

In this paper we offer direct evidence that financial intermediation does impact underlying asset markets. We develop a specific observable symptom of a banking system that underprices the put option imbedded in non-recourse asset-backed lending. Using a dataset for 19 countries and over 500...

Lenders are frequently accused of mispricing the put option imbedded in non-recourse lending (Herring and Wachter, 1999 and 2003). Prior research (Pavlov and Wachter, 2004) shows one lender's incentives to underprice. Here we identify the conditions for a market-wide underpricing equilibrium. We...