One important characteristic of the recent mortgage crisis is the prevalence of subprime mortgages with adjustable interest rates and their high default rates. In this paper, we build and estimate a dynamic structural model of adjustable-rate mortgage defaults using unique mortgage loan level data. The data contain detailed information not only on borrowers’ mortgage payment history and lender ...

Scaling up home energy retrofits requires that associated loans be priced efficiently. Using a unique dataset of posted loan prices scraped from online simulators made available by French credit institutions, we examine the differentiation interest rates in relation to project risk. Crucially, our data are immune sorting bias based on borrower characteristics. We find greener, arguably less ris...

This paper presents an analysis of mortgage delinquency between 2004 and 2008 using a loan-level data set from a major national mortgage bank. Our analysis highlights two problems underlying the mortgage crisis: a reliance on mortgage brokers who tend to originate lowerquality loans and a prevalence of low-documentation loans—known in the industry as ‘‘liar’s loans’’—that result in borrower inf...

Repayment versus Investment Conditions and Exclusivity in Lending Contracts Lenders condition future loans on some index of past performance. Typically, banks condition future loans on repayments of earlier obligations whilst international organizations (official lenders) condition future loans on the implementation of some policy action (‘investment’). We build an agency model that accounts fo...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from output expansion in countries with many adjustment loans than in countries with few adjustment loans. By...

On the example of a commercial microfinance institution (MFI) in Tanzania this paper investigates first whether agricultural firms have a different probability to get a loan and whether their loans are differently volume rationed than loans to non-agricultural firms. Second, we analyze whether agricultural firms repay their loans with different delinquencies than non-agricultural firms. Our res...

External financing is important when inventors and small technology-based firms commercialize their inventions. However, the private information of inventors about the quality of their products causes information asymmetries and moral hazard problems. To help compensate for potentially non-existing capital markets, the Swedish Government has intervened by offering loans with different terms to ...