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Working Paper
Does Skin in the Game Align Incentives? The Case of CRE CLOs
This paper examines whether high levels of risk retention effectively align incentives in securitizations, using evidence from the $100 billion-plus commercial real estate collateralized loan obligation (CRE CLO) market. CRE CLO sponsors retain all equity and non–investment-grade tranches, far exceeding Dodd–Frank Act minimums. Despite this substantial retention, we find that security returns are driven in part by resolving distressed loans through par-value buyouts back to sponsor balance sheets, shifting losses outside the trust. Moreover, sponsors vertically integrated across servicing ...
Journal Article
The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the asset-backed securities (ABS) market, resulting in higher spreads on ABS and briefly halting the issuance of some ABS. On March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve established the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to support the flow of credit to consumers and businesses by re-enabling the issuance of ABS. In this article, the authors describe how TALF works, how much it was used, and its effect on the issuance and spreads of TALF-eligible securities relative to those of TALF-ineligible securities. They find that both the introduction of TALF and ...
Report
COVID Response: The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the asset-backed securities (ABS) market, resulting in higher spreads on ABS and briefly halting the issuance of some ABS. On March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve established the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to support the flow of credit to consumers and businesses by re-enabling the issuance of ABS. In this paper, we describe how TALF works, how much it was used, and its effect on the issuance and spreads of TALF-eligible securities relative to those of TALF-ineligible securities. We find that both the introduction of TALF and its ...
Journal Article
Credit risk transfer and de facto GSE reform
The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, now in their fifth year, shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private-sector investors. This study summarizes and evaluates the CRT programs, finding that they have been successful in reducing the exposure of the government-sponsored enterprises and the federal government to mortgage credit risk without disrupting the liquidity or stability of mortgage secondary markets. The programs have also created a new financial market for pricing and trading mortgage credit risk, which has grown in ...
Working Paper
Screen More, Sell Later: Screening and Dynamic Signaling in the Mortgage Market
In dynamic models of asset markets with asymmetric information and endogenous screening, the anticipation of signaling through delayed sales incentivizes originators to exert greater effort ex ante. A central prediction in those models is a positive relationship between screening effort and the delay of sale. We test this theoretical prediction using the mortgage market as a laboratory, with processing time serving as a measure of screening effort. In line with the theory, mortgage processing time and the delay of sale after origination are strongly positively related in the data. Both ...
Working Paper
Agency Conflicts in Residential Mortgage Securitization: What Does the Empirical Literature Tell Us?
The agency conflicts inherent in securitization are viewed by many as having been a key contributor to the recent financial crisis, despite the presence of various legal and economic constructs to mitigate them. A review of recent empirical research for the U.S. home mortgage market suggests that securitization itself may not have been a problem, but rather the origination and distribution of observably riskier loans. Low-documentation mortgages, for which asymmetric information problems are acute, performed especially poorly during the crisis. Securitized low-documentation mortgages ...
Journal Article
The Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
The securitization markets for consumer and business asset-backed securities (ABS) and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS), which supply a substantial share of credit to consumers and small businesses, came to a near-complete halt in the fall of 2008, as investors responded to a drastic decline in funding liquidity by curtailing their participation in these markets. In response, the Federal Reserve introduced the TALF program, which extended term loans collateralized by securities to buyers of certain high-quality ABS and CMBS, as part of a broad array of emergency liquidity measures ...
Report
Credit risk transfer and de facto GSE reform
We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?s credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the exposure of the federal government to mortgage credit risk without disrupting the liquidity or stability of mortgage secondary markets. In the process, the programs have created a new financial market for pricing and trading mortgage credit risk, which has grown in size and liquidity over time. The CRT ...
Working Paper
The Mortgage Rate Conundrum
We document the emergence of a disconnect between mortgage and Treasury interest rates in the summer of 2003. Following the end of the Federal Reserve expansionary cycle in June 2003, mortgage rates failed to rise according to their historical relationship with Treasury yields, leading to significantly and persistently easier mortgage credit conditions. We uncover this phenomenon by analyzing a large dataset with millions of loan-level observations, which allows us to control for the impact of varying loan, borrower and geographic characteristics. These detailed data also reveal that ...
Report
Securitization and the fixed-rate mortgage
Fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) dominate the U.S. mortgage market, with important consequences for monetary policy, household risk management, and financial stability. In this paper, we show that the share of FRMs is sharply lower when mortgages are difficult to securitize. Our analysis exploits plausibly exogenous variation in access to liquid securitization markets generated by a regulatory cutoff and time variation in private securitization activity. We interpret our findings as evidence that lenders are reluctant to retain the prepayment and interest rate risk embedded in FRMs. The form of ...