This paper develops a simple model with credit rationing and endogenous default risk in which the expectation of a bailout may lead to a financial sector which is too large with respect to the the social optimum. The paper concludes with a short discussion of how this model could be used as a...

[...]This paper examines the benchmark role of the U.S.Treasury market and the features that make it an attractivebenchmark. In it, I examine the market’s recent performance,including yield changes relative to other fixed-income markets,changes in liquidity, repo market developments, and...

This paper first provides a simple but very general framework for credit portfolio modellingwhich is based on the distinction between systematic and unsystematic risk. Unsystematicor borrower-specific risk vanishes through diversification in a very large, infinitelyfine-grained portfolio. The...

Value at risk (VaR) is today the standard tool in risk management for banks and other financial institutions. It is defined as the worst loss for a given confidence level: For a confidence level of e.g. p=99%, one is 99% certain that at the end of a chosen risk horizon there will be no greater...

This paper shows how financial contracts might be redesigned to allow for banks to manage the idiosyncratic component for their own accounts.