ABSTRACT We investigate how firms respond to strengthening of creditor rights by examining their financial decisions following a securitization reform in India. We find that the reform led to a reduction in secured debt, total debt, debt maturity, and asset growth, and an increase in liquidity hoarding by firms. Moreover, the effects are more pronounced for firms that have a higher proportion of tangible assets because these firms are more affected by the secured transactions law. These results suggest that strengthening of creditor rights introduces a liquidation bias and documents how firms alter their debt structures to contract around it.

We examine whether securitization impacts renegotiation decisions of loan servicers, focusing on their decision to foreclose a delinquent loan. Conditional on a loan becoming seriously delinquent, we find a significantly lower foreclosure rate associated with bank-held loans when compared to similar securitized loans: across various specifications and origination vintages, the foreclosure rate of delinquent bank-held loans is 3% to 7% lower in absolute terms (13% to 32% in relative terms). There is a substantial heterogeneity in these effects with large effects among borrowers with better credit quality and small effects among lower quality borrowers. A quasi-experiment that exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in securitization status of a delinquent loan confirms these results.

This article examines the link between mortgage securitization and lender screening during the boom and bust of the U.S. housing market. Using comprehensive data on both prime and subprime securitized and bank-held loans, we provide evidence that securitization affected lenders' screening decisions in the subprime market for low-documentation loans through two channels: the securitization rate and the time it takes to securitize a loan. The change in decision-making by subprime lenders occurs on dimensions that are unreported to investors. Examining the time-series evolution of the securitization market further reinforces these findings. We exploit heterogeneity across subprime and prime markets to illustrate that the potential for moral hazard may be reduced with greater collection of hard information and increased monitoring of lenders. Our results suggest that the policy debate regarding securitization and lenders' underwriting standards should separately evaluate the agency and non-agency markets, with special attention toward the extent of soft information in assets being securitized.

We employ a unique data set on members of an elite service club in Germany to investigate how social connections in elite networks affect the allocation of resources. Specifically, we investigate credit allocation decisions of banks to firms inside the network. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we document misallocation of bank credit inside the network, with bankers with weakly aligned incentives engaging most actively in crony lending. Our findings, thus, resonate with existing theories of elite networks as rent extractive coalitions that stifle economic prosperity.

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.

Statistical default models, widely used to assess default risk, fail to account for a change in the relations between different variables resulting from an underlying change in agent behavior. We demonstrate this phenomenon using data on securitized subprime mortgages issued in the period 1997–2006. As the level of securitization increases, lenders have an incentive to originate loans that rate high based on characteristics that are reported to investors, even if other unreported variables imply a lower borrower quality. Consistent with this behavior, we find that over time lenders set interest rates only on the basis of variables that are reported to investors, ignoring other credit-relevant information. As a result, among borrowers with similar reported characteristics, over time the set that receives loans becomes worse along the unreported information dimension. This change in lender behavior alters the data generating process by transforming the mapping from observables to loan defaults. To illustrate this effect, we show that the interest rate on a loan becomes a worse predictor of default as securitization increases. Moreover, a statistical default model estimated in a low securitization period breaks down in a high securitization period in a systematic manner: it underpredicts defaults among borrowers for whom soft information is more valuable. Regulations that rely on such models to assess default risk could, therefore, be undermined by the actions of market participants.

This paper exploits intertemporal variations in employment protection across countries and finds that rigidities in labor markets are an important determinant of firms' capital structure decisions. Over the 1985–2007 period, we find that reforms increasing employment protection are associated with a 187 basis point reduction in leverage. We interpret this finding to suggest that employment protection increases operating leverage, crowding out financial leverage. This result does not appear to be due to pretreatment differences between treated and control firms, omitted variables, unobserved changes in regional economic conditions, and reverse causality. Heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with our economic intuition.

We study the wealth accumulation of Indian state politicians using public disclosures required of all candidates. The annual asset growth of winners is 3–5 percent higher than that of runners-up, a difference that holds also in a set of close elections. The relative asset growth of winners is greater in more corrupt states and for those holding ministerial positions. These results are consistent with a rent-seeking explanation for the relatively high rate of growth in winners’ assets.

We provide microeconomic evidence on ethnic frictions and market efficiency, using dyadic data on managers and borrowers from a large Indian bank. We conjecture that, if exposure to religion-based communal violence intensifies intergroup animosity, riot exposure will lead to lending decisions that are more sensitive to a borrower’s religion. We find that riot-exposed Hindu branch managers lend relatively less to Muslim borrowers and that these loans are less likely to default, consistent with riot exposure exacerbating taste-based discrimination. This bias is persistent across a bank officer’s tenure, suggesting that the economic costs of ethnic conflict are long-lasting, potentially spanning across generations.