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Report
Understanding the securitization of subprime mortgage credit
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 picture of the subprime borrower and the subprime loan, discussing both predatory borrowing and predatory lending. We present the key structural features of a typical subprime securitization, document how rating agencies assign credit ratings to mortgage-backed securities, and outline how these agencies ...
Report
MBS ratings and the mortgage credit boom
We study credit ratings on subprime and Alt-A mortgage-backed-securities (MBS) deals issued between 2001 and 2007, the period leading up to the subprime crisis. The fraction of highly rated securities in each deal is decreasing in mortgage credit risk (measured either ex ante or ex post), suggesting that ratings contain useful information for investors. However, we also find evidence of significant time variation in risk-adjusted credit ratings, including a progressive decline in standards around the MBS market peak between the start of 2005 and mid-2007. Conditional on initial ratings, we ...
Journal Article
Your credit score is a ranking, not a score
With credit scores affecting so many important aspects of our lives, it?s no wonder that people are concerned with improving their scores. Once they start to pay attention to them, though, consumers often find their scores changing in unpredictable ways. Knowing that your score is not a rating of your creditworthiness but a measure of where your creditworthiness ranks relative to everyone else is the first step in understanding your score and how to manage it.
Journal Article
Credit risk rating at large U.S. banks
Large banks use internally developed credit rating systems to differentiate the riskiness of their commercial loans. Internal ratings are an essential ingredient of effective credit risk management for such banks, whose commercial borrowers may number in the tens of thousands. This article describes these rating systems, how their design varies across institutions, and how they are used in risk management. The article also outlines conceptual and practical difficulties currently faced by banks in achieving accurate and consistent ratings and describes ways in which some institutions have ...
Working Paper
How consistent are credit ratings? a geographic and sectoral analysis of default risk
We examine differences in default rates by sector and obligor domicile. We find evidence that credit ratings have been imperfectly calibrated across issuer sectors in the past. Controlling for year of issue and rating, default rates appear to be higher for U.S. financial firms than for U.S. industrial firms. Sectoral differences in recovery rates do not offset the higher default rates. By contrast, we do not find significant differences in default rates between U.S. and foreign firms.
Journal Article
Rollout of FACTA complete
Journal Article
Credit risk data may help target foreclosure mitigation
What Ninth District areas are being especially hard hit by foreclosure?
Working Paper
Good news is no news? The impact of credit rating changes on the pricing of asset-backed securities
We assess the impact of credit ratings on the pricing of structured financial products, using a sample of more than 1300 changes in Moody's or Standard and Poor's (S&P) ratings of U.S. asset-backed securities (ABS). We find that rating downgrades tend to be accompanied by negative returns and widening spreads, with the average effects stronger than those that have been reported in prior research on corporate and sovereign bond ratings. A portion of the negative implications of ABS downgrades are anticipated by price movements ahead of the rating action, although to a lesser degree than has ...
Working Paper
Credit ratings and bank monitoring ability
In this paper we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks? loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks? credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal that publicly available information from a credit bureau is not efficiently impounded in the bank ratings: The credit bureau ratings not only predict future movements in the bank ratings but also improve forecasts of bankruptcy and loan default. We investigate possible explanations for these findings. ...