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Contribution to Book
Mortgage Portfolio Diversification in the Presence of Cross-Sectional and Spatial Dependence
Essays in Honor of Cheng Hsiao (Advances in Econometrics, Vol. 41), (2020)
  • Timothy Dombrowski
  • R. Kelley Pace
  • Rajesh P. Narayanan
Abstract
Portfolios of mortgage loans played an important role in the Great Recession and continue to compose a material part of bank assets. This chapter investigates how cross-sectional dependence in the underlying properties flows through to the loan returns, and thus, the risk of the portfolio. At one extreme, a portfolio of foreclosed mortgage loans becomes a portfolio of real estate whose returns exhibit substantial cross-sectional and spatial dependence. Near the other extreme, almost all loans perform and yield constant returns, which do not correlate with other performing loan returns. This suggests that loan performance effectively censors the random returns of the underlying properties. Following the statistical properties of the correlations among censored variables, the authors build off this foundation and show how the loan return correlations will rise as economic conditions deteriorate and the defaulting loans reveal the underlying housing correlations. In this chapter, the authors (1) adapt tools from spatial statistics to document substantial cross-sectional dependence across house price returns and examine the spatial structure of this dependence, (2) investigate the nonlinear nature of correlations among loan returns as a function of the default rate and the underlying house price correlations, and (3) conduct a simulation exercise using parameters from the empirical data to show the implications for holding a portfolio of mortgages.


Keywords
  • Portfolio diversification,
  • Censored variables,
  • Cross-sectional dependence,
  • Mortgage markets,
  • Spatial dependence,
  • Variogram
Publication Date
April 15, 2020
Editor
Li, T., Pesaran, M.H. and Terrell, D. (Ed.)
Publisher
Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley,
ISBN
978-1-78973-958-9
DOI
10.1108/S0731-905320200000041014
Citation Information
Timothy Dombrowski, R. Kelley Pace and Rajesh P. Narayanan. "Mortgage Portfolio Diversification in the Presence of Cross-Sectional and Spatial Dependence" Essays in Honor of Cheng Hsiao (Advances in Econometrics, Vol. 41), (2020) p. 383 - 411
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tim-dombrowski/7/