Prepayment behaviors of Japanese residential mortgages

Naoki Kishimoto and Yong-Jin Kim

Japan and the World Economy, 2014, vol. 30, issue C, 1-9

Abstract: We investigate full prepayments of Japanese residential mortgages during a ten-year period from 1996 to 2005. This investigation is important because the amount of mortgages outstanding in Japan is huge, yet the study on their prepayments is very limited. This period from 1996 to 2005 was characterized by two distinct features of the evolution of interest rates that might have significant effects on mortgage refinancing. First, interest rate fluctuations were limited to a narrow range of a little over 1%. Surprisingly, full prepayments of Japanese mortgages were sensitive to small changes in interest rates. Second, long-term refinance rates did not fall well below the contract rates of most mortgages in our sample during the ten-year period, while short-term refinance rates did. With this interest rate relationship, if mortgagors ever refinanced, it was likely that they rolled over short-term mortgage rates several times until they repaid mortgages completely. Hence, we examine the sensitivity of full prepayments to short-term vs. long-term interest rates, mortgagors’ expectation of future course of interest rates (by the slope of yield curve), and that of interest rate volatility. Our analysis shows that short-term interest rates have a slightly greater explanatory power for full prepayments than long-term interest rates. In addition, our analysis confirms that full prepayments are sensitive to both the slope of yield curve and interest rate volatility. Other issues we look into are the patterns of full prepayments in relation to loan age and seasonality. We find that the pattern of full prepayments relative to loan age is comparable to that of mortgages in the U.S., and that the seasonal pattern of full prepayments is attributable to relevant institutional arrangements in Japan.

Keywords: Prepayment behavior; Japanese residential mortgages; Refinance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 G15 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0922142514000036
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:japwor:v:30:y:2014:i:c:p:1-9

DOI: 10.1016/j.japwor.2013.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

Japan and the World Economy is currently edited by Robert Dekle and Yasushi Hamao

More articles in Japan and the World Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().