Many observers have argued that credit default swaps contributed significantly to the credit crisis. Of particular concern to these observers are that credit default swaps trade in the largely unregulated over-the-counter market as bilateral contracts involving counterparty risk and that they...

The headline numbers appear to show that even as banks and financial intermediaries suffered large credit losses in the financial crisis of 2007-09, they raised substantial amounts of new capital, both from private investors and through government-funded capital injections. However, on closer...

In spite of mounting losses banks continued to pay dividends during the crisis. We present a model that addresses this behavior. By paying out dividends, a bank transfers value to its shareholders away from creditors, among whom are other banks. This way, one bank's dividend payout policy...

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage emerges naturally from the interplay between two sets of forces. First, seniority and diversification reduce bank asset volatility by an order of magnitude relative to that of...

We investigate the leverage of hedge funds in the time series and cross section. Hedge fund leverage is counter-cyclical to the leverage of listed financial intermediaries and decreases prior to the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. Hedge fund leverage is lowest in early 2009 when the...

Derivatives exposures across large financial institutions often contribute to - if not necessarily create - systemic risk. Current reporting standards for derivatives exposures are nevertheless inadequate for assessing these systemic risk contributions. In this paper, I explain how a...

The credit crisis was sparked by a shock to fundamentals, housing prices failed to rise, which led to a collapse of trust in credit markets. In particular, the repurchase agreement market in the U.S., estimated to be about $12 trillion, larger than the total assets in the U.S. banking system...

How does the market value complex structured-credit securities? This issue is central to understanding the current financial crisis and identifying effective policy measures. We study this issue from a novel perspective by contrasting the valuation of CDO equity with that of bank stocks. This is...

Here, I present and discuss a "10-by-10-by-10" network-based approach to monitoring systemic financial risk. Under this approach, a regulator would analyze the exposures of a core group of systemically important financial firms to a list of stressful scenarios, say 10 in number. For each...

In the United States today, the system of financial regulation is complex and fragmented. Responsibility to regulate the financial services industry is split between about a dozen federal agencies, hundreds of state agencies, and numerous industry-sponsored self-governing associations....