Asymmetric Information About Collateral Values

Book excerpt: I empirically analyze credit market outcomes when competing lenders are differentially informed about the expected return from making a loan. I study the residential mortgage market where property developers often cooperate with vertically integrated mortgage lenders to offer financing to buyers of new homes. I show that these integrated lenders have superior information about the construction quality of individual homes and exploit this information to lend against higher-quality collateral, decreasing foreclosures by up to 40%. To compensate for this adverse selection on collateral values, non-integrated lenders charge higher interest rates when competing against a better-informed integrated lender.