The recently finalized Basel II Capital Accord requires banks to adopt a procedure to estimate the operational risk capital charge. Under the Advanced Measurement Approaches, that are currently mandated for all large internationally active US banks, require the use of historic operational loss...

We propose a new top-down approach to measure systemic risk in the financial system. Our framework uses a combination of macroeconomic, financial and rating factors in representative regions of the world. We formulate a mixed-frequency state-space model to estimate macroeconomic factors. To...

We estimate an unobservable domestic business conditions index for Australia using a variety of observable macroeconomic and financial variables, relating it to an unobservable external index involving external variables relevant to Australia. Our small open economy, dynamic factor model uses...

We present an empirical model of systemic banking crises from an Australian perspective. Having no history of domestic banking crises in recent history, our quantitative model is estimated using an international panel data set spanning 18 countries and 30 years of observations. We evaluate in a...

There appears to be a consensus that the recent instability in global financial markets may be attributable in part to the failure of financial modeling. More specifically, current risk models have failed to properly assess the risks associated with large adverse stock price behavior. In this...

Using four years of second-by-second executed trade data, we study the intraday effects of a representative group of scheduled economic releases on three exchange rates: EUR/$, JPY/$ and GBP/$. Using wavelets to analyze volatility behavior, we empirically show that intraday volatility clusters...

Recently, a body of academic literature has focused on the area of stable distributions and their application potential for improving our understanding of the risk of hedge funds. At the same time, research has sprung up that applies standard Bayesian methods to hedge fund evaluation. Little or...

We consider the sensitivity of conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) with respect to the tail index assuming regularly varying tails and exponential and faster-than-exponential tail decay for the return distribution. We compare it to the CVaR sensitivity with respect to the scale parameter for stable...

In the post-crisis era, financial institutions seem to be more aware of the risks posed by extreme events. Even though there are attempts to adapt methodologies drawing from the vast academic literature on the topic, there is also skepticism that fat-tailed models are needed. In this paper, we...

This paper proposes a profit model for spread trading by focusing on the stochastic movement of the price spread and its first hitting time probability density. The model is general in that it can be used for any financial instrument. The advantage of the model is that the profit from the trades...