Implied Base Correlations of Single-tranche CDOs on standardized Credit Indices such as the iTraxx Europe have been used in the credit derivatives market for price communication. During the financial crisis, implied correlations have been quite volatile indicating the growing fraction of...

We present and discuss preliminary evidence suggesting that credit ratings significantly influenced prices for subprime mortgage-backed securities issued in the period leading up to the recent financial crisis. Ratings are closely correlated with prices even controlling for a rich set of...

We introduce a reduced-form modeling framework for mortgage-backed securities in which we solve for the implied prepayment function from the cross section of market prices. From the implied prepayment function, we find that prepayment rates are driven not only by interest rates, but also by two...