Supply driven mortgage choice

Variable mortgage contracts dominate the UK mortgage market (Miles, 2004). The dominance of the variable rate mortgage contracts has important consequences for the transmission mechanism of monetary policy decisions and systemic risks (Khandani et al., 2012; Fuster and Vickery, 2013). This raises an obvious concern that a mortgage market such as that in the UK, where the major proportion of mortgage debt is either at a variable or fixed for less than two years rate (Badarinza, et al., 2013; CML, 2012), is vulnerable to alterations in the interest rate regime. Theoretically, mortgage choice is determined by demand and supply factors. So far, most of the existing literature has focused on the demand side perspective, and what is limited is consideration of supply side factors in empirical investigation on mortgage choice decisions. This paper uniquely explores whether supply side factors may partially explain observed/ex-post mortgage type decisions. Empirical results detect that lenders’ profit motives and mortgage funding/pricing issues may have assisted in preferences toward variable rate contracts. Securitisation is found to positively impact upon gross mortgage lending volumes while negatively impacting upon the share of variable lending flows. This shows that an increase in securitisation not only improves liquidity in the supply of mortgage funds, but also has the potential to shift mortgage choices toward fixed mortgage debt. The policy implications may involve a number of measures, including reconsideration of the capital requirements for the fixed, as opposed to the variable rate mortgage debt, growing securitisation and optimisation of the mortgage pricing policies

Diversification benefit and return performance of REITs using CAPM and Fama-French: Evidence from Turkey

This paper analyzes return enhancement patterns of Turkish REITs (T-REITs) from various perspectives over the period of July 2008 and March 2015. We find that T-REITs portfolio provides a slightly lower level of risk diversification benefit than investment trusts, but higher than the banks. The evidence suggests that portfolio managers and investors may not only be able to utilize knowledge deriving from the CAPM, but also utilize information retrieved from Fama-French model due to its relatively better performance on capturing the variation in T-REITs returns. Results also disclose that T-REITs show a degree of diversity in property focus, and reveal mainly defensive, small and financially distressed characteristics. Finally, based on the multiple observations, a case can be made for a possible linkage between property focus and yield improvement/risk taking structure of T-REITs. This study provides implications for the capacity of T-REITS and improve return enhancement capacity in an efficient portfolio management. Keywords: REIT, CAPM, Fama-French model, Turkish REITs, Borsa Istanbul, JEL codes: R30, G12, G1