Using all loans granted to firms recorded in the Italian credit register, we estimate correlations between risk-transfer and default probabilities to gauge the severity of informational asymmetries in the loan securitization market. First, the analysis confirms the presence of information...

A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks' lending standards. We investigate the larger part of the market for securitized assets (“prime mortgages”). Information on over...

A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks' lending standards. We investigate a large part of the market for securitized assets (“prime mortgages”) in Italy, a country with...

A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks' lending standards. We investigate a large part of the market for securitized assets ("prime mortgages") in Italy, a country with a...

Using credit register data for loans to Italian firms we test for the presence of asymmetric information in the securitization market by looking at the correlation between the securitization (risk-transfer) and the default (accident) probability. We can disentangle the adverse selection from the...