Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to...

The average cash to assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms increases by 129% from 1980 to 2004. Because of this increase in the average cash ratio, American firms at the end of the sample period can pay back their debt obligations with their cash holdings, so that the average firm has no...

Since almost eliminating net debt, the Australian Government%u2019s attention has turned to the financing of broader balance sheet liabilities, such as public sector superannuation. Australia will be developing a significant financial asset portfolio in the %u2018Future Fund%u2019 to smooth the...

Transaction costs in trading involve both risk and return. The return is associated with the cost of immediate execution and the risk is a result of price movements during a more gradual trading. The paper shows that the trade-off between risk and return in optimal execution should reflect the...

We present a model of flight to quality episodes that emphasizes systemic risk and the Knightian uncertainty surrounding these episodes. Agents make risk management decisions with incomplete knowledge. They understand their own shocks, but are uncertain of how correlated their shocks are with...

quot;Risk managementquot; in securities markets refers to the oversight of portfolio managers and professional traders when they trade on behalf of investors in security markets. Monitoring of their trading performance, profit and loss, and risk-taking behavior, is measured by principals using...

This paper contributes to the economics of financial institutions risk management by exploring how loan securitization affects their default risk, their systematic risk, and their stock prices. In a typical CDO transaction a bank retains through a first loss piece a very high proportion of the...

In this paper we argue that risk-adjustment matters for the valuation of financial distress costs, since financial distress is more likely to happen in bad times. Systematic distress risk implies that the risk-adjusted probability of financial distress is larger than the historical probability....

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the risk of trading revenues of U.S. commercial banks. We collect quarterly data on trading revenues, broken down by business line, as well as the Value at Risk-based market risk charge. The overall picture from these preliminary results is that there...

This paper argues that banks have a unique ability to hedge against market-wide liquidity shocks. Deposit inflows provide funding for loan demand shocks that follow declines in market liquidity. Consequently, one dimension of bank specialness' is that banks can insure firms against systematic...