IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v125y2010i1p307-362..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence from Subprime Loans

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin J. Keys
  • Tanmoy Mukherjee
  • Amit Seru
  • Vikrant Vig

Abstract

A central question surrounding the current subprime crisis is whether the securitization process reduced the incentives of financial intermediaries to carefully screen borrowers. We examine this issue empirically using data on securitized subprime mortgage loan contracts in the United States. We exploit a specific rule of thumb in the lending market to generate exogenous variation in the ease of securitization and compare the composition and performance of lenders' portfolios around the ad hoc threshold. Conditional on being securitized, the portfolio with greater ease of securitization defaults by around 10%–25% more than a similar risk profile group with a lesser ease of securitization. We conduct additional analyses to rule out differential selection by market participants around the threshold and lenders employing an optimal screening cutoff unrelated to securitization as alternative explanations. The results are confined to loans where intermediaries' screening effort may be relevant and soft information about borrowers determines their creditworthiness. Our findings suggest that existing securitization practices did adversely affect the screening incentives of subprime lenders.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin J. Keys & Tanmoy Mukherjee & Amit Seru & Vikrant Vig, 2010. "Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence from Subprime Loans," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(1), pages 307-362.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:125:y:2010:i:1:p:307-362.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.1.307
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:125:y:2010:i:1:p:307-362.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.