2. A comparison of MBS and CB
This section reviews securitization and the CB process. After carefully
examining MBS and CB – which we refer to collectively as secondary mortgage
securities or SMS – we show ways in which they are similar and different. This allows
us to develop hypotheses about when they are used. As part of this, we present some
background data.
2.1 Data
To examine the decision to issue SMS, we use data from six countries – France,
Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. – over the period starting in 2003 and
ending in 2007. At least some banks in these countries issued either CB or MBS, but our
sample includes all banks with at least one billion dollars of total assets at the beginning
of our sample period. We get balance sheet and income statement data from
Bankscope and data on SMS issuance from Dealogic. House price indexes have been
obtained from Eurostat for the European countries and from the Federal Housing
Finance Agency in the U.S. To remove potential outliers, we trim our data at the 1st and
99th percentile of all variables used in the empirical analysis