Using the announcement of the first Greek bailout on April 11, 2010, we quantify significant spillover effects from sovereign to corporate credit risk in Europe. A ten percent increase in sovereign credit risk raises corporate credit risk on average by 1.1 percent after the bailout. These...

This paper derives indicators of the severity and structure of banking system risk from asymptotic interdependencies between banks’ equity prices. We use new tools available from multivariate extreme value theory to estimate individual banks’ exposure to each other (“contagion risk”) and...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral assets, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank’s collateral framework. As an important innovation, we allow for two-sided...

Banks typically determine their capital levels by separately analysing credit and interest rate risk, but the interaction between the two is significant and potentially complex. We develop an integrated economic capital model for a banking book where all exposures are held to maturity. Our...

This paper analyzes the influence of market discipline on the risk-taking incentives of banks. It is shown that market discipline reduces risk if banks can credibly commit to a given level of risk before the interest rate on deposits is set. If, however, the bank can readjust the level of risk...

We examine the quantification of operational risk for banks. We adopt a financial-economics approach and interpret operational risk management as a means of optimizing the profitability of an institution along its value chain. We start by defining operational risk and then propose a...

In this paper, we characterize explicitly the first derivative of the Value at Risk and the Expected Shortfall with respect to portfolio allocation when netting between positions exists. As a particular case, we examine a simple Gaussian example in order to illustrate the impact of netting...

Like many financial contracts, derivatives are subject to default risk. A very popular mechanism in derivatives markets to mitigate the risk of non-performance on contracts is margining. By attaching collateral to a contract, margining supposedly reduces default risk. The broader impacts of the...

Economic cycles are the key credit portfolio risk driver and they are autocorrelated over time. We then show that it is economically meaningful to define risk for credit portfolios in a multi period setup. Since one period expected shortfall fails to measure risk adequately in a multi period...

We introduce an adaptive importance sampling method for the loss distribution of credit portfolios based on the Robbins-Monro stochastic approximation procedure. After presenting the subtle construction of the algorithm, we apply our adaptive scheme for calculating the risk figures of a typical...