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...

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...

We analyze the structure and attributes of subprime mortgage-backed securitization deals originated between 1997 and 2007. Our data set allows us to link loan-level data for over 6.7 million subprime loans to the securitization deals into which the loans were sold. We show that the...

It is well known that the financial turmoil of 2007-2008 had its roots in the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States. There are several causes which triggered the sub-prime mortgage crisis; among them, the lax lending policies and the securitization practices had a prominent role. The...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the financial crisis of 2007 - 8. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed indices is...

The Legacy Loans Program is an elaborate way of slicing the FDIC's receivership assets. At best, the financial structure is irrelevant to the FDIC's expected long-run recovery rates. Yet, it may boost short-term prices by creating bond insurance liabilities that will come due several years down...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed...

Subprime securitizations were designed to produce safe AAA bonds by insulating them from the risks associated with the underlying mortgages. Yet, they became risky during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We provide evidence that following the decline in the ABX indices which signaled emerging...

With private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS), investors bore default risk; while this risk should have been priced, as systemic risk grew, the pricing of risk did not increase. This paper attempts to explain why this happened. We point to market institutions' incentive misalignments that...

How did investors holding assets backed by subprime residential mortgages react when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the so-called "teaser freezer" plan to modify mortgages in December 2007? We apply event-study methodology to the ABX index, the only source of daily securities prices in...