A heterogeneous panel cointegration‐error correction approach to modelling commercial mortgage‐backed security prices

Abstract

Provides the first empirical time series analysis of commercial mortgage‐backed securities (CMBS) prices using a proprietary data set of 15 senior tranche securities. Postulates and tests the hypothesis that nonstationary CMBS and corporate bond prices are cointegrated since CMBS are priced analogous to corporate bonds. States that given the emerging status of the CMBS market, price data is limited to less than three years. To overcome the low power of unit root and cointegration methodology for short data sets, appeals to the concept of cointegration in heterogeneous panels advanced by Pedroni (1995). Claims the presence of cointegration between CMBS and corporate bond prices confirms that the stationary first difference in CMBS and corporate bond prices must be modelled in an error correction framework (ECM). Further states the sensitivity of CMBS price changes to changes in the default probability, proxied by the market value of loans to property value, is tested in a simple first order approximation ECM framework. The results suggest that senior tranche CMBS which comprise no more than 70 per cent are immune to the risk from default loss and supports the predictions in Childs et al. (1996).