Reducing transaction costs and the need for international reserves is a primary objective to the establishment of regional payment agreements. Another objective, especially in the case of Latin America where the Ecuadorian promoters of the Bank of the South and the New Architecture are planning...

Fragmented payment systems are a major obstacle to financial integration at the regional and international levels. The European Union has launched ambitious policies for the ceation of common payment systems among its country members. Significant results have been achieved in some aspects, but...

We propose a tractable framework for quantifying the impact of fire sales on the volatility and correlations of asset returns in a multi-asset setting. Our results enable to quantify the impact of fire sales on the covariance structure of asset returns and provide a quantitative explanation for...

An intricate web of claims and obligations ties together the balance sheets of a wide variety of financial institutions. Under the occurrence of default, these interbank claims generate externalities across institutions and possibly disseminate defaults and bankruptcy. Building on a simple model...

This article uses graph theory to provide novel evidence regarding market integration, a favorable condition for systemic risk to appear in. Relying on daily futures returns covering a 12-year period, we examine cross- and inter-market linkages, both within the commodity complex and between...

Risk diversification is the basis of insurance and investment. It is thus crucial to study the effects that could limit it. One of them is the existence of systemic risk that affects all the policies at the same time. We introduce here a probabilistic approach to examine the consequences of its...

The spectacular failure of the 150-year old investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15th, 2008 was a major turning point in the global financial crisis that broke out in the summer 2007. Through the use of stock market data and Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads, this paper examines the...

The post-crisis financial reforms address the need for systemic regulation, focused not only on individual banks but also on the whole financial system. The regulator principal objective is to set banks' capital requirements equal to international minimum standards in order to mimimise systemic...

We identify a potential bias in the methodology disclosed in July 2013 by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) for identifying systemically important financial banks. Contrary to the original objective, the relative importance of the five categories of risk importance (size,...

As most Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) engage in securities lending or are based on total return swaps, they expose their investors to counterparty risk. To mitigate the funds' exposure, their counterparties must pledge collateral. In this paper, we present a framework to study collateral risk and...