Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Markets: Regulation And Innovation In Post-Crisis Mortgage And Structured Finance Markets, William W. Bratton, Adam J. Levitin

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article takes the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis to review recent developments in the structured products market, connecting the emergent pattern to post-crisis regulation.

The Article tells a tale of two markets. The financial crisis stemmed from excessive risk-taking and shabby practice in the subprime home mortgage market, a market that owed its existence to the private-label, originate to securitize model. But the pre-crisis boom in private label subprime mortgage-backed securities could never have happened absent back up financing from an array of structured products and vehicles created in the capital markets—the CDOs that found …

Behaviorism In Finance And Securities Law, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I take stock (as something of an outsider) of the behavioral economics movement, focusing in particular on its interaction with traditional cost-benefit analysis and its implications for agency structure. The usual strategy for such a project—a strategy that has been used by others with behavioral economics—is to marshal the existing evidence and critically assess its significance. My approach in this Essay is somewhat different. Although I describe behavioral economics and summarize the strongest criticisms of its use, the heart of the Essay is inductive, and focuses on a particular context: financial and securities regulation, as recently revamped …

Using Monte Carlo Simulations To Establish A New House Price Stress Test, James R. Follain, Seth H. Giertz

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

The focus of this paper is on the house price stress test (termed ALMO) that was designed to assess the fiscal strength of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and, if necessary, to trigger remedial action in order to avert a crisis. We assess whether the ALMO stress test was an adequate representation of an extremely weak housing market, given the best available information leading up to the Great Recession. A Monte Carlo simulation model is developed to estimate the severity of low probability events (i.e., severe house price declines). We illustrate the complexity and subjective nature of the process used …