Banks are regulated more than most firms, making them good subjects to study regulatory arbitrage (avoidance). Their latest arbitrage opportunity may be the new leverage rule covering the largest U.S. banks; leverage rules require equal capital against assets with unequal risks, so banks can...

Climate change could impose systemic risks upon the financial sector, either via disruptions in economic activity resulting from the physical impacts of climate change or changes in policies as the economy transitions to a less carbon-intensive environment. We develop a stress testing procedure...

This paper investigates the incentives for banks to bias their internally generated risk estimates. We are able to estimate bank biases at the credit level by comparing bank-generated risk estimates within loan syndicates. The biases are positively correlated with measures of regulatory capital,...

Bank capital requirements are based on a mix of market values and book values. We investigate the effects of a policy change that ties regulatory capital to the market value of the "available-for-sale" investment securities portfolio for some banking organizations. Our analysis is based on...

Complexity of banks can have important ramifications for the performance and the risks of the banking system. Financial sector reforms that were implemented in the past decade have thus aimed to reduce and to better manage the risk implications of bank complexity. Yet, surprisingly little is...

The 2010s saw a profound shift towards jumbo mortgage lending by large banks that are regulated under the Dodd-Frank Act. Using data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, we show that the “jumbo shift” is correlated with being subject to the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR)...

The CLASS model is a top-down capital stress testing framework that uses public data, simple econometric models and auxiliary assumptions to project the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. banking firms. Through the lens of the model, we find that the total banking system capital shortfall...

Pierret (2015) presents empirical analysis of the solvency-liquidity nexus for the banking system, documenting that a shock to the level of banks' solvency risk is followed by lower short-term debt. Conversely, higher short-term debt Granger-causes higher solvency risk. These results point...

We find that competition from payday lenders leads depository institutions to raise overdraft fees and reduce the availability of “free” checking accounts. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks’ practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the...

We identify and track over time the factors that make the financial system vulnerable to fire sales by constructing an index of aggregate vulnerability. The index starts increasing quickly in 2004, before most other major systemic risk measures, and triples by 2008. The fire-sale-specific...