We investigate whether a bank’s performance during the 1998 crisis, which was viewed at the time as the most dramatic crisis since the Great Depression, predicts its performance during the recent financial crisis. One hypothesis is that a bank that has an especially poor experience in a crisis...

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...

We analyze the impact of funding costs and margin requirements on prices of index options traded on the CBOE. We propose a model that gives upper and lower bounds for option prices in the absence of arbitrage in an incomplete market with differential borrowing and lending rates. We show that...

Regulators charged with monitoring systemic risk need to focus on sentiment as well as narrowly defined measures of systemic risk. This chapter describes techniques for jointly monitoring the co-evolution of sentiment and systemic risk. To measure systemic risk, we use Marginal Expected...

We study European banks’ demand for short-term funds (liquidity) during the summer 2007 subprime market crisis. We use bidding data from the European Central Bank's auctions for one-week loans, their main channel of monetary policy implementation. Our analysis provides a high-frequency,...

We present a careful analysis of possible issues of the application of the self-excited Hawkes process to high-frequency financial data and carefully analyze a set of effects that lead to significant biases in the estimation of the "criticality index'' n that quantifies the degree of endogeneity...

Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous...

In this paper we examine the quantitative effects of margin regulation on volatility in asset markets. We consider a general equilibrium in finite-horizon economy with heterogeneous agents and collateral constraints. There are two assets in the economy which can be used as collateral for...

We have analyzed the risks of possible development of bubbles in Switzerland's residential real estate market. The data employed in this work has been collected by comparis.ch, and carefully cleaned from duplicate records through a procedure based on supervised machine learning methods. The...