IRLE IRLE WORKING PAPER #122-15 October 2015 The Causes of Fraud in Financial Crises: Evidence from the Mortgage-Backed Securities Industry Neil Fligstein and Alexander Roehrkasse Cite as: Neil Fligstein and Alexander Roehrkasse (2015). “The Causes of Fraud in Financial Crises: Evidence from the Mortgage-Backed Securities Industry”. IRLE Working Paper No. 122-15. http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/122-15.pdf irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers FRAUD IN FINANCIAL CRISES The Causes of Fraud in Financial Crises: Evidence from the Mortgage-Backed Securities Industry* Neil Fligstein Alexander Roehrkasse University of California–Berkeley Key words: white-collar crime; finance; organizations; markets. * Corresponding author: Neil Fligstein, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, University of California– Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1980. Email:
[email protected]. We thank Ogi Radic for excellent research assistance, and Diane Vaughan, Cornelia Woll, and participants of conferences and workshops at Yale Law School, Sciences Po, the German Historical Society, and the University of California–Berkeley for helpful comments. Roehrkasse acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE 1106400. All remaining errors are our own. FRAUD IN FINANCIAL CRISES ABSTRACT The financial crisis of 2007-2009 was marked by widespread fraud in the mortgage securitization industry. Most of the largest mortgage originators and mortgage-backed securities issuers and underwriters have been implicated in regulatory settlements, and many have paid multibillion-dollar penalties. This paper seeks to explain why this behavior became so pervasive. We evaluate predominant theories of white-collar crime, finding that those emphasizing deregulation or technical opacity identify only necessary, not sufficient conditions.