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Working Paper
Secondary Market Liquidity and the Optimal Capital Structure
We present a model where endogenous liquidity generates a feedback loop between secondary market liquidity and firms' financing decisions in primary markets. The model features two key frictions: a costly state verification problem in primary markets, and search frictions in over-the-counter secondary markets. Our concept of liquidity depends endogenously on illiquid assets put up for sale relative to the resources available for buying those assets in the secondary market. Liquidity determines the liquidity premium, which affects issuance in the primary market, and this effect feeds back into ...
Journal Article
The securitization of housing finance
Since 1970, housing finance has undergone a radical transformation due to the securitization of mortgage loans. As the market for mortgage securities continues to grow and develop, this transformation raises a number of important public policy issues.
Journal Article
Securitization
Journal Article
The rise of the originate-to-distribute model and the role of banks in financial intermediation
This is the second article in a series which explores the changing role of banks in the financial intermediation process. It accompanies a Liberty Street Blog series. Both discuss the complexity of the credit intermediation chain associated with securitization and note the growing participation of nonbank entities within it. These series also discuss implications for monitoring and rulemaking going forward. In this article, the authors show that, beginning in the early 1990s, lead banks increasingly used the originate-to-distribute model in their corporate lending business and that the ...
Working Paper
Bank capital regulation and secondary markets for bank assets
The paper derives optimal capital requirements, when the bank?s quality is private information. The supervisor can inspect the bank and punish the undercapitalized one with recapitalization and downsizing. The cost of bank?s capital and its ability to sell its assets are crucial for the bank?s incentive to reveal its quality truthfully. The paper provides following policy implications. First, sensitivity of capital requirements to the bank?s quality should be low in good times and high in bad times. Second, a leverage ratio should be accompanied by a requirement that the bank selling its ...
Journal Article
Volatile mortgage rates - a new fact of life?
Mortgage interest rates now move much more closely with capital market rates than in the past. This important development stems in part from the removal of mortgage usury ceilings. But the main reason for the closer relationship of mortgage rates to capital market rates is growth of the secondary mortgage market.
Working Paper
GSEs, mortgage rates, and secondary market activities
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that purchase mortgages and issue mortgage-backed securities (MBS). In addition, the GSEs are active participants in the primary and secondary mortgage markets on behalf of their own portfolios of MBS. Because these portfolios have grown quite large, portfolio purchases as well as MBS issuance are likely to be important forces in the mortgage market. This paper examines the statistical evidence of a connection between GSE actions and the interest rates paid by mortgage borrowers. We find that both portfolio purchases and ...
Report
Bank loan sales: a new look at the motivations for secondary market activity
Bank lending traditionally involves the extension of credit that is held by the originating bank until maturity. Loan sales allow banks to deviate from this pattern by transferring loans in part or in their entirety from their own books to those of another institution. This paper uses a new methodology to test the validity of two hypotheses regarding banks' motivations for selling and buying loans: (1) the comparative advantage hypothesis, that banks with a comparative advantage in originating loans sell and those with a comparative advantage in funding loans buy, and (2) the diversification ...
Journal Article
Turning uncertainty into risk: why data are the key to greater investment
Proceedings of the Conference on the Secondary Market for Community Development Loans. <p> The role of data dominated much of the discussion at the Federal Reserve?s Secondary Market for Community Development Loans Conference. In our discussions of how to attract new investors to the field, the group reviewed all the things that investors are looking for: volume, geographic diversity, homogeneous assets, etc. But what became clear was that, above all, investors need data. Any investment is possible only if the investor has the necessary information?the data?to decide whether to make an ...