During the week of August 6, 2007, a number of quantitative long/short equity hedge funds experienced unprecedented losses. It has been hypothesized that a coordinated deleveraging of similarly constructed portfolios caused this temporary dislocation in the market. Using the simulated returns of...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market-rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities-led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

The combination of rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities can create unintentional synchronization of homeowner leverage, leading to a “ratchet” effect on leverage because homes are indivisible and owner-occupants cannot raise equity to...

Unlike other industries in which intellectual property is patentable, the financial industry relies on trade secrecy to protect its business processes and methods, which can obscure critical financial risk exposures from regulators and the public. We develop methods for sharing and aggregating...

The financial industry relies on trade secrecy to protect its business processes and methods, which can obscure critical financial risk exposures from regulators and the public. Using results from cryptography, we develop computationally tractable protocols for sharing and aggregating such risk...

We apply machine-learning techniques to construct nonlinear nonparametric forecasting models of consumer credit risk. By combining customer transactions and credit bureau data from January 2005 to April 2009 for a sample of a major commercial bank's customers, we are able to construct...

Using the simulated returns of long/short equity portfolios based on five valuation factors, we find evidence that the "Quant Meltdown" of August 2007 began in July and continued until the end of 2007. We simulate a high-frequency marketmaking strategy, which exhibited significant losses during...

<italic>The Derivatives Sourcebook</italic> is a citation study and classification system that organizes the many strands of the derivatives literature and assigns each citation to a category. Over 1800 research articles are collected and organized into a simple web-based searchable database. We have also...

New security designs, improvements in computer telecommunications technology and advances in the theory of finance have led to revolutionary changes in the structure of financial markets and institutions. This paper provides a functional perspective on the dynamics of institutional change and...