We examine the role of borrower concerns about future credit availability in mitigating the effects of adverse selection and income misrepresentation in the mortgage market. We show that the majority of additional risk associated with ?low-doc? mortgages originated prior to the Great Recession was due to adverse selection on the part of borrowers who could verify income but chose not to. We pro…
Credit underwriting is a dynamic process involving multiple interactions between borrower and lender. During this process, lenders have the opportunity to obtain hard and soft information from the borrower. We analyze more than 108,000 home equity loans and lines-of-credit applications to study the role of soft and hard information during underwriting. Our data set allows us to distinguish lend…