Many observers have argued that credit default swaps contributed significantly to the credit crisis. Of particular concern to these observers are that credit default swaps trade in the largely unregulated over-the-counter market as bilateral contracts involving counterparty risk and that they...

This paper examines the use of credit derivatives by US bank holding companies from 1999 to 2003 with assets in excess of one billion dollars. Using the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Bank Holding Company Database, we find that in 2003 only 19 large banks out of 345 use credit derivatives....

We present a novel empirical benchmark for analyzing credit risk using "pseudo firms" that purchase traded assets financed with equity and zero-coupon bonds. By no-arbitrage, pseudo bonds are equivalent to Treasuries minus put options on pseudo-firm assets. Empirically, like corporate spreads,...

This paper contributes to the economics of financial institutions risk management by exploring how loan securitization affects their default risk, their systematic risk, and their stock prices. In a typical CDO transaction a bank retains through a first loss piece a very high proportion of the...

This paper derives indicators of the severity and structure of banking system risk from asymptotic interdependencies between banks' equity prices. We use new tools available from multivariate extreme value theory to estimate individual banks' exposure to each other ("contagion risk") and to...

In this paper we argue that risk-adjustment matters for the valuation of financial distress costs, since financial distress is more likely to happen in bad times. Systematic distress risk implies that the risk-adjusted probability of financial distress is larger than the historical probability....

Discussions of financial risk often fail to distinguish between risks that are consciously borne and those that are not. To understand the breeding conditions for financial crises the prime focus of concern should not be simply on large risk-taking per se, but on the unintended, or unanticipated...

We propose a novel mechanism, "financial dampening," whereby loan retrenchment by banks attenuates the effectiveness of monetary policy. The theory unifies an endogenous supply of illiquid local loans and risk-sharing among subsidiaries of bank holding companies (BHCs). We derive an IV-strategy...