Securitization and Optimal Retention Under Moral Hazard

13 Pages Posted: 15 Apr 2012 Last revised: 5 Jan 2023

See all articles by Sara Malekan

Sara Malekan

HEC Montreal - Department of Finance

Georges Dionne

HEC Montreal - Department of Finance

Date Written: May 9, 2012

Abstract

Securitization is one of the most important innovations in financial markets. It is a process of converting illiquid loans that cannot be sold readily to third-party investors into liquid securities and selling them to dispersed investors. As a result, securitization improves liquidity in capital markets by allowing originators to remove the issued loans from its balance sheet and use the proceeds for other purposes or even to originate new loans. In spite of all its advantages, securitization is often suspected of being one of the main reasons for the recent financial crisis. One concern that is frequently raised in the literature is that securitization leads to moral hazard in lender screening and monitoring. By selling loans to investors and removing them from their books, banks have a lesser incentive to carefully evaluate and monitor borrowers’ credit quality to ensure that they can repay the loans, because the risk of delinquencies falls on investors rather than lenders. One problem in the literature is that the analysis of securitization is very general and suffers from a lack a specific security design analysis under asymmetric information. We address the moral hazard problem using a principal-agent model where the investor is the principal and the lender is the agent. We show that the optimal contract must contain a retention clause in the presence of moral hazard.

Keywords: Securitization, optimal retention, moral hazard, principal-agent model, default, screening, monitoring

JEL Classification: D81, D82, D86, G24

Suggested Citation

Malekan, Sara and Dionne, Georges, Securitization and Optimal Retention Under Moral Hazard (May 9, 2012). Journal of Mathematical Economics, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2014, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2038831 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2038831

Sara Malekan

HEC Montreal - Department of Finance ( email )

3000 Chemin de la Cote-Sainte-Catherine
Montreal, Quebec H3T 2A7
Canada

Georges Dionne (Contact Author)

HEC Montreal - Department of Finance ( email )

3000 Chemin de la Cote-Sainte-Catherine
Montreal, Quebec H3T 2A7
Canada
514-340-6596 (Phone)
514-340-5019 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.hec.ca/gestiondesrisques/

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