Accepted by........................

This thesis consists of three empirical essays on securitization and the resolution of financial distress, examining the information content of prices of mortgage-backed securities, the role of securitization in preventing mortgage renegotiation and the effect of minimum bids in ascending price auctions of repossessed assets. In the first chapter, I present evidence that the prices at origination of residential mortgage backed securities contain information on the quality of the underlying asset pools above what is reflected in the ratings. Yield spreads at issuance predict both future downgrades and defaults even after the information contained in ratings is taken into account. This holds for all rating classes except triple-A. Yield spreads of the highest rated securities have no predictive power for future performance. This suggests that investors in triple-A were less informed about the quality of the securitized assets than investors in riskier, more information sensitive securities. In the second chapter (co-authored with Kris Gerardi and Paul Willen), we show that securitization does not explain the reluctance among lenders to renegotiate home mortgages. We focus on seriously delinquent borrowers from 2005 through the third quarter of 200