Commercial Mortgage-backed Securities: Prepayment and Default

Optimal prepayment and default rules for mortgage-backed securities

We study the optimal stopping problems embedded in a typical mortgage. Despite a possible non-rational behaviour of the typical borrower of a mortgage, the problem is worth to be solved for the lender to hedge against the prepayment risk, and because many mortgage-backed securities pricing model incorporate this suboptimality via a so-called prepayment function which can depend, at time t, on t...

Rational Prepayment and the Valuation of Mortgage-Backed Securities

This article presents a new model of mortgage prepayments, based on rational decisions by mortgage holders. These mortgage holders face heterogeneous transaction costs, which are explicitly modeled. The model is estimated using a version of Hansen’s (1982) generalized method of moments, and shown to capture many of the empirical features of mortgage prepayment. Estimation results indicate that ...

What is Subordination About? Credit Risk and Subordination Levels in Commercial Mortgage-backed Securities (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 subordination is purely about credit risk as intended. We find a very weak relation between subordination leve...

Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS) and Market Efficiency with respect to Costly Information

Commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) are complex asset backed securities trading in markets that do not currently use derivatives pricing technology. This lack of usage is due to the complexity of the modeling exercise, and only the recent and costly availability of historical data. As such, CMBS markets provide a natural environment for the testing of market efficiency with respect to ...

Credit Risk and Subordination Levels in Commercial Mortgage-backed Securities (CMBS)