Many financial markets operate as electronic limit order books under a price-time priority rule. In this setting, among all resting orders awaiting trade at a given price, earlier orders are prioritized for matching with contra-side liquidity takers. This creates a technological arms race among...

We study information and portfolio choices when securities' dividends depend on an aggregate (macro) risk factor and idiosyncratic (micro) shocks, and when investors can acquire costly dividend information. We establish a general result under which investors endogeneously specialize in either...

Contingent capital in the form of debt that converts to equity as a bank approaches financial distress offers a potential solution to the problem of banks that are too big to fail. This paper studies the design of contingent convertible bonds and their incentive effects in a structural model...

Banking regulations set minimum levels of capital for banks. These requirements are generally formulated through a ratio of capital to risk-weighted assets. A risk-weighting scheme assigns a weight to each asset or category of assets and effectively functions as a linear constraint on a bank's...

The reform program for the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market launched by the G-20 nations in 2009 seeks to reduce systemic risk from OTC derivatives. The reforms require that standardized OTC derivatives be cleared through central counterparties (CCPs), and they set higher capital and...

We analyze the optimal allocation of trades to portfolios when the cost associated with an allocation is proportional to each portfolio's risk. Our investigation is motivated by changes in the over-the-counter derivatives markets, under which some contracts may be traded bilaterally or through...

We analyze covariance matrix estimation from the perspective of market risk management, where the goal is to obtain accurate estimates of portfolio risk across essentially all portfolios—even those with small standard deviations. We propose a simple but effective visualization tool to assess...

We find that an increase in the ``unusualness'' of news with negative sentiment predicts an increase in stock market volatility. Similarly, unusual positive news forecasts lower volatility. Our analysis is based on more than 360,000 articles on 50 large financial companies, published in...

A credit valuation adjustment (CVA) is an adjustment applied to the value of a derivative contract or a portfolio of derivatives to account for counterparty credit risk. Measuring CVA requires combining models of market and credit risk to estimate a counterparty's risk of default together with...

We model an electronic limit order book as a multi-class queueing system under fluid dynamics, and formulate and solve a problem of limit and market order placement to optimally buy a block of shares over a short, predetermined time horizon. Using the structure of the optimal execution policy,...