We investigate determinants of lenders' choice to securitize loans, focusing on the quality of loans they sell to investors in the secondary mortgage market relative to ones they retain on their balance-sheets. Using several large datasets of mortgage loans originated between 2004 and 2007, we...

Toxic mortgage related assets in bank portfolios have tested the pervasive free market wisdom that markets can effectively discipline the risk taking behavior of financial firms. In the buildup to the current crises, banks over-leveraged themselves by investing in risky mortgage securities. In...

As the fallout from subprime losses clearly demonstrates, the credit risk in residential mortgages is large and economically significant. To manage this risk, this paper proposes the creation of derivative instruments based on the credit losses of a reference mortgage pool. We argue that these...

This paper proposes two measures of credit risk for the population of outstanding mortgages. The first uses an average ex ante default probability to characterize risk, the second uses the unexpected loss generated by the asymptotic single factor risk (ASFR) model, a probabilistic model of...