State Foreclosure Laws and the Incidence of Mortgage Default

Cem Demiroglu, Evan Dudley and Christopher James

Journal of Law and Economics, 2014, vol. 57, issue 1, 225 - 280

Abstract: This paper examines how differences in state foreclosure laws influence the incidence of default in the residential mortgage market. In particular, we examine how judicial review requirements, lenders' recourse rights (deficiency judgments), and state assistance programs for distressed borrowers affected the likelihood of default during the recent U.S. housing crisis. We argue that state foreclosure laws should have little effect on the likelihood of liquidity events (for example, shocks to borrowers' ability to make payments) and thus provide a good instrument for identifying borrowers' costs of default. We find that borrowers with negative home equity are significantly more likely to default in states with borrower-friendly foreclosure laws. Finally, we examine how recent state and federal loan foreclosure prevention programs affected the likelihood of default. Overall, we find a significant decline in the effect of judicial review requirements but not deficiency judgments on default after 2008.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/674868 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/674868 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/674868

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Law and Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().