%0 Conference Paper %B 16th Annual European Real Estate Society Conference %D 2009 %T What Are the Driving Forces Behind Swedish Housing Consumersí Interest Rate Decisions? %A Maria Hullgren %X "This paper discusses the birth and growth of mortgage industry in Turkey and evaluates the prevailing 10-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) contracts with embedded prepayment and default options. In September 2007, seven months after the passage of mortgage law, almost every bank in our sample offered mortgage coupon rates that are significantly below the computed equilibrium mortgage coupon rates, involving a clear arbitrage profit for the borrowers. While the currently observed FRM coupon rates in November 2008 are approximately equal to the computed equilibrium mortgage coupon rates, 20-25 per cent coupon rates per annum are extremely high for establishing a wellfunctioning primary mortgage market in any economy. As every sample bank has significantly increased its mortgage coupon rates, and most of the banks have drastically reduced their contract maturities over the past year, we argue that the global financial crisis has affected visibly mortgage lending in Turkey."" %B 16th Annual European Real Estate Society Conference %S ERES: Conference %C Stockholm, Sweden %G eng %3 RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2009_147 %! Conference 2009 %& Housing %R 10.15396/eres2009_147