Search Results
Report
Robust capital regulation
Banks? leverage choices represent a delicate balancing act. Credit discipline argues for more leverage, while balance-sheet opacity and ease of asset substitution argue for less. Meanwhile, regulatory safety nets promote ex post financial stability, but also create perverse incentives for banks to engage in correlated asset choices and to hold little equity capital. As a way to cope with these distorted incentives, we outline a two-tier capital framework for banks. The first tier is a regular core capital requirement that helps deter excessive risk-taking incentives. The second tier, a novel ...
Journal Article
Why were banks better off in the 2001 recession?
In a sharp turnaround from their fortunes in the 1990-91 recession, banks came through the 2001 recession reasonably well. A look at industry and economy-wide developments in the intervening years suggests that banks fared better largely because of more effective risk management. In addition, they benefited from a decline in short-term interest rates and the relative mildness of the 2001 downturn.
Journal Article
Robust capital regulation
Regulators and markets can find the balance sheets of large financial institutions difficult to penetrate, and they are mindful of how undercapitalization can create incentives to take on excessive risk. This study proposes a novel framework for capital regulation that addresses banks' incentives to take on excessive risk and leverage. The framework consists of a special capital account in addition to a core capital requirement. The special account would accrue to a bank's shareholders as long as the bank is solvent, but would pass to the bank's regulators?rather than its creditors?if the ...
Conference Paper
Hedging bank liquidity risk
Liquidity risk in banking has been attributed to transactions deposits and their potential to spark runs or panics. We show instead that transactions deposits help banks hedge liquidity risk from unused loan commitments. Bank stock-return volatility increases with unused commitments, but the increase is smaller for banks with high levels of transactions deposits. This deposit-lending risk management synergy becomes more powerful during periods of tight liquidity, when nervous investors move funds into their banks. Our results reverse the standard notion of liquidity risk at banks, where runs ...
Report
A general approach to integrated risk management with skewed, fat-tailed risks
The goal of integrated risk management in a financial institution is to measure and manage risk and capital across a range of diverse business activities. This requires an approach for aggregating risk types (market, credit, and operational) whose distributional shapes vary considerably. In this paper, we use the method of copulas to construct the joint risk distribution for a typical large, internationally active bank. This technique allows us to incorporate realistic marginal distributions that capture some of the essential empirical features of these risks-such as skewness and fat ...
Working Paper
Exact maximum likelihood estimation of ARCH models
Report
Visible and hidden risk factors for banks
This paper examines the common factors that drive the returns of U.S. bank holding companies from 1997 to 2005. We compare a range of market models from a basic one-factor model to a nine-factor model that includes the standard Fama-French factors and additional factors thought to be particularly relevant for banks such as interest and credit variables. We show that the market factor clearly dominates in explaining bank returns, followed by the Fama-French factors. The bank-specific factors are not informative, particularly for the largest banks, which take advantage of protection in the form ...
Report
Macroprudential supervision of financial institutions: lessons from the SCAP
A fundamental conclusion drawn from the recent financial crisis is that the supervision and regulation of financial firms in isolation--a purely microprudential perspective--are not sufficient to maintain financial stability. Rather, a macroprudential perspective, which evaluates and responds to the financial system as a whole, seems necessary, and the ongoing discussions of regulatory reform in the United States underscore this view. The recently concluded Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), better known as the bank "stress test," is one example of how the macro- and ...
Journal Article
Hedge funds, financial intermediation, and systemic risk
Hedge funds, with assets under management approaching an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2006, have become important players in the U.S. and global capital markets. These largely unregulated funds differ from other market participants in their use of a variety of complex trading strategies and instruments, in their liberal use of leverage, in their opacity to outsiders, and in their convex compensation structure. These differences can exacerbate potential market failures stemming from agency problems, externalities, and moral hazard. Counterparty credit risk management (CCRM) practices, used by ...
Report
Hedge funds, financial intermediation, and systemic risk
Hedge funds are significant players in the U.S. capital markets, but differ from other market participants in important ways such as their use of a wide range of complex trading strategies and instruments, leverage, opacity to outsiders, and their compensation structure. The traditional bulwark against financial market disruptions with potential systemic consequences has been the set of counterparty credit risk management (CCRM) practices by the core of regulated institutions. The characteristics of hedge funds make CCRM more difficult as they exacerbate market failures linked to agency ...