NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
THE INEFFICIENCY OF REFINANCING:
WHY PREPAYMENT PENALTIES ARE GOOD FOR RISKY BORROWERS
Christopher J. Mayer
Tomasz Piskorski
Alexei Tchistyi
Working Paper 16586
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16586
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
December 2010
This research was completed while Mayer was a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Board and
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. We thank Patrick Bolton, Bruce Carlin, Raj Chetty, Douglas
Diamond, Scott Frame, Mark Garmaise, Mikhail Golosov, Daniel Hubbard, Randall Kroszner, David
Laibson, Karen Pence, Mitch Peterson, Rafael Repullo, Tony Sanders, Shane Sherlund, Chester Spatt,
Jeremy Stein, Suresh Sundaresan, Aleh Tsyvinski, Neng Wang, Matthew Weinzierl, and seminar participants
at Columbia Business School, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Chicago Fed, UC Irvine, AEA Annual Meeting,
NBER Corporate Finance meeting, NBER Housing and Public Policy meeting, Stanford Institute for
Theoretical Economics meeting, AREUEA summer meeting, 3rd NYC Real Estate Meeting, University
of Virginia Law School conference on "Law and Economics of Consumer Credit", SED meeting, Summer
Real Estate Symposium, AREUEA annual meeting for helpful comments and suggestions. Adam Ashcraft,
Andrew Haughwout, Andreas Lehnert, Karen Pence, and Joe Tracy provided invaluable help in putting
together and understanding the data. Alex Chinco and Rembrandt Koning provided excellent research
assistance and helpful modeling suggestions. The research was supported by the Paul Milstein Center
for Real Estate at Columbia Business School. The comments are the opinions of the authors and do
not represent the views of the Federal Reserve System or the National Bureau of Economic Research.
NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-
reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official
NBER publications.
© 2010 by Christopher J. Mayer, Tomasz Piskorski, and Alexei Tchistyi. All rights reserved. Short
sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided
that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.