Material Detail

This video was recorded at YALE - ECON 251 - Financial Theory. A mortgage involves making a promise, backing it with collateral, and defining a way to dissolve the promise at prearranged terms in case you want to end it by prepaying. The option to prepay, the refinancing option, makes the mortgage much more complicated than a coupon bond, and therefore something that a hedge fund could make money trading. In this lecture we discuss how to build and calibrate a model to forecast prepayments in order to value mortgages. Old fashioned economists still make non-contingent forecasts, like the recent predictions that unemployment would peak at 8%. A model makes contingent forecasts. The old prepayment models fit a curve to historical data estimating how sensitive aggregate prepayments have been to changes in the interest rate. The modern agent based approach to modeling rationalizes behavior at the individual level and allows heterogeneity among individual types. From either kind of model we see that mortgages are very risky securities, even in the absence of default. This raises the question of how investors and banks should hedge them.

This will delete the comment from the database. This operation is not reversible. Are you sure you want to do it?

Thank you for reporting a broken "Go to Material" link in MERLOT to help us maintain a collection of valuable learning materials.

If you feel this material is inappropriate for the MERLOT Collection, please click SEND REPORT, and the MERLOT Team will investigate. Thank you!

You are being taken to the material on another site. This will open a new window.

Do not show me this again