Market participants use leveraged derivatives to gain access to equity market exposure through broker banks. Leverage and interconnectedness via overlapping portfolios of dealer banks can amplify adverse market movements, potentially causing sizeable losses. I propose a model, based on granular...

Stricter derivative margin requirements have increased the demand for liquid collateral but euro area investment funds which use derivatives extensively have been reducing their liquid asset holdings. Using transaction-by-transaction derivatives data, we assess whether the current levels of...

This paper presents a model for stress testing investment funds, based on a broad worldwide sample of primary open-end equity and bond funds. First, we employ a Bayesian technique to project the impact of macro-financial scenarios on country-level portfolio flows worldwide that are constructed...

In this paper we study risk-neutral densities (RNDs) for the German stock market. The use of option prices allows us to quantify the risk-neutral probabilities of various levels of the DAX index. For the period from December 1995 to November 2001, we implement the mixture of log-normals model...

During the March 2020 market turmoil, euro area money-market funds (MMFs) experienced significant outflows, reaching almost 8% of assets under management. This paper investigates whether the volatility in MMF flows was driven by investors' liquidity needs related to derivative margin payments....

Almost two decades after the introduction of the common currency, differences in institutional frameworks remain a major source of cross-country heterogeneity in the eurozone. We develop a two-country model with incomplete international markets in which the availability of credit depends on the...

The Great Recession has been characterised by the two stylized facts: the buildup of leverage in the household sector in the period preceding the recession and a protracted economic recovery that followed. We attempt to explain these two facts as an information friction, whereby agents are...

Using household survey data, we document evidence of a loosening of credit standards in Euro area countries that experienced a property price boom-and-bust cycle. Borrowers in these countries exhibited significantly higher loan-to-value (LTV) and loan-to-income (LTI) ratios in the run up to the...

This paper proposes a framework for deriving early-warning models with optimal out-of-sample forecasting properties and applies it to predicting distress in European banks. The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, the paper introduces a conceptual framework to guide the process...

This paper uses data on bilateral foreign exposures of domestic banking systems in order to construct early warning models for financial crises that take into account cross-country spill-overs of vulnerabilities. The empirical results show that incorporating cross-country financial linkages can...