We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...

Especially structured finance instruments were blamed as main reason for the financial crisis 2007, but the understanding for the motivation to originate securitization products is less discovered. Therefor this paper tries to identify main balance sheet characteristics of structured finance...

Two factors have proven to be strongly relevant for the subprime mortgage crisis. The first is the lack of screening incentives of originators, which had not been anticipated by investors. The second is that investors relied too much on credit ratings. We examine whether investors have learned...

Lack of transparency in securitization transactions significantly contributed to the severe financial crisis of 20072009. To increase transparency we propose a new mechanism: financial claims with fingerprints. They would allow market participants at each stage of the securitization process to...

The strong growth in collateralized debt obligation transactions raises the question how these transactions are designed. The originator designs the transaction so as to maximize her benefit subject to requirements imposed by investors and rating agencies. An important issue in these...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the subprime mortgage securitization process and the seven key informational frictions that arise. We discuss the ways that market participants work to minimize these frictions and speculate on how this process broke down. We continue with a complete...

We empirically investigate the benefits of multiple ratings not only at issuance of debt instruments but also during the subsequent monitoring phase. Using a record of monthly credit rating migration data on all U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities rated by Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and...

We examine the link between issuer reputation and mortgage-backed security (MBS) performance using a sample of 4,247 European MBS issued between 1999 and 2007. We measure performance with credit rating downgrades and delinquencies and track their changes over the long term. We find that,...

We study optimal securitization of defaultable assets in a continuous time setting. A financial intermediary can create a portfolio of defaultable assets and then sell it to outside investors. The default risk of the assets in the portfolio is determined by the unobservable costly effort exerted...

The following descriptive paper surveys the various types of loan securitisation and provides a working definition of so-called collateralised loan obligations (CLOs). Free of the common rhetoric and slogans, which sometimes substitute for understanding of the complex nature of structured...