We show that banks' cash flow exposure to interest rate risk, or income gap, plays a crucial role in their lending behavior following monetary policy shocks. In a first step, we show that the sensitivity of bank profits to interest rates increases significantly with their income gap, even when...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

The dangers of shouting ``fire'' in a crowded theater are well understood, but the dangers of rushing to the exit in the financial markets are more complex. Yet, the two events share several features, and I analyze why people crowd into theaters and trades, why they run, what determines the...

Financial crises are associated with reduced volumes and extreme levels of rates for term inter-bank transactions, such as in one-month and three-month LIBOR markets. We provide an explanation of such stress in term lending by modelling leveraged banks’ precautionary demand for liquidity. When...

This article presents an application of extreme value theory to compute the value at risk of a market position. In statistics, extremes of a random process refer to the lowest observation (the minimum) and to the highest observation (the maximum) over a given time-period. Extreme value theory...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk...

After a rapid expansion of financial transactions, both the authorities and financial institutions became aware of the risk involved in interbank settlement systems. To cope with the risk the systems in most economies have been designed so that large-sized payments are settled in the real time...

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While...

We investigate the question of whether sophistication in risk management fosters banking stability. We compare a simple banking system in which an average rating is used with a sophisticated banking system in which banks are able to assess the default risk of entrepreneurs individually. Both...