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...

We demonstrate that asymmetric information between sellers (loan originators) and purchasers (investors and securities issuers) of commercial mortgages gives rise to a standard “lemons problem”, whereby portfolio lenders use private information to liquidate lower quality loans in CMBS...

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...

We provide new evidence of cyclical variation in mortgage default option exercise. For a given level of negative equity, borrower propensity to default rose markedly during the financial crisis and in hard-hit metropolitan areas. Analysis of time-series and panel data indicates the importance of...

Mortgage loss-given-default (LGD) increased significantly when house prices plummeted and delinquencies rose during the financial crisis, but it has remained over 40 percent in recent years despite a strong housing recovery. Our results indicate that the sustained high LGDs post-crisis are due...