Liquidity Constraints, Home Equity and Residential Mortgage Losses

This paper analyses how mortgage borrower liquidity constraints and home equity drive the realized loss rates given default using loan-level data. We define defaulted loans with zero loss as cures and those with non-zero loss as non-cures. We find economically that borrower liquidity constraints and positive equity explain cure, while negative equity explains non-zero loss. The findings provide an important economic-rationale for a separation of the cure and loss processes in mortgage loss models and their applications such as loan pricing and bank capital regulation. The results have great relevance for the multi-trillion dollar mortgage industry for a more efficient capital allocation, better mortgage pricing and more forward-looking loan loss provisioning.