IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v22y2009i7p2257-2294.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is the Market for Mortgage-Backed Securities a Market for Lemons?

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Downing
  • Dwight Jaffee

Abstract

This paper models and provides empirical evidence for the quality of assets that are securitized through bankruptcy remote special purpose vehicles (SPVs). The model predicts that assets sold to SPVs will be of lower quality ("lemons") compared to assets that are not sold to SPVs. We find strong empirical support for this prediction using a comprehensive data set of sales of mortgage-backed securities (Freddie Mac Participation Certificates, or PCs) to SPVs over the period 1991 through 2002. Valuation estimates based on a structural two-factor model indicate that PCs sold to SPVs are on average valued $0.39 lower per $100 of face value relative to PCs not so sold. For the four largest coupon groups in our full sample of Freddie Mac PCs, we find a "lemons spread" of 4--6 basis points in terms of yield-to-maturity, and this spread accounts for 13--45% of the overall prepayment spread of these securities. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Downing & Dwight Jaffee, 2009. "Is the Market for Mortgage-Backed Securities a Market for Lemons?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(7), pages 2257-2294, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:22:y:2009:i:7:p:2257-2294
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhn114
    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:rfinst:v:22:y:2009:i:7:p:2257-2294. 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://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    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.