This paper analyses how the risk-sharing capacity of the financial system varies over the business cycle, leading to procyclical fragility. We show how financial imperfections contribute to underinsurance by entrepreneurs, generating an externality that leads to the build-up of systematic risk...

This paper proposes a new method for measuring investor 'risk appetite'. Like other indicators in the literature, it is based on a comparison of risk-neutral probabilities of future returns with the corresponding subjective probabilities. The precise nature of the comparison is novel, however,...

IMF programmes are frequently criticised for lacking focus and being ineffective in helping maintain private credit lines following a debt crisis. A theoretical model is developed to explore the interlinkages between result-based conditionality and creditor collective action problems. The...

Financial institutions have for many years sought measures which cogently summarise the diverse market risks in portfolios of financial instruments. This quest led institutions to develop Value-at-Risk (VaR) models for their trading portfolios in the 1990s. Subsequently, so-called filtered...