The increase in defaults in the subprime mortgage market is widely held to be one of the causes behind the recent financial turmoil. Key issues of policy concern include quantifying the role of various factors, such as home price declines and loosened underwriting standards, in the recent...

Subordination is designed to provide credit risk protection for senior commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) tranches by allocating the initial credit losses to the more junior tranches. Subordination level should in theory reflect the underlying credit risk of the CMBS pool. In this...

Subordination is designed to provide credit risk protection for senior CMBS tranches by allocating the initial credit losses to the more junior tranches. Subordination level should in theory reflect the underlying credit risk of the CMBS pool. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that...