Bank regulators consider minimum capital standards essential for promoting well-functioning banking systems. Despite their existence, however, such standards have been insufficient to prevent periodic disruptions in the banking sectors of various countries. The most recent disruption was the...

Should Congress enact a formal cost-benefit analysis requirement for financial regulation? I survey the nature of costs and benefits of financial regulation, both “macro” regulation designed to stop crises and “micro” regulation of products, markets, and institutions. Although I find...

Calls for benefit-cost analysis in rule-making based on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act have revealed a paucity of work on allocative efficiency in financial markets. We propose three principles to help fill this gap. First, we highlight the need to quantify the "statistical cost of a...

Banking is risky and prone to failure. Yet banking regulation is surprisingly not all that risk-sensitive in practice. I show that when the bank has an informational advantage over the regulator, designing risk-sensitive banking regulation gives rise to a trade-off: relying on the banking market...

We study the design of stress tests that provide information about aggregate and idiosyncratic risk in banks’ portfolios and impose contingent capital requirements. In the optimal static test, an adverse scenario fails all weak and some strong banks, limiting the stigma of failure. Sequential...

Banking is risky and prone to failure. Yet banking regulation is surprisingly not all that risk-sensitive in practice. I show that when the bank has an informational advantage over the regulator, designing risk-sensitive banking regulation gives rise to a trade-off: relying on the banking market...

A stochastic optimization framework is presented for liquidity risk management which is one of the principle issues facing an asset/liability manager. The various sources of cashflow uncertainty are first introduced. The notion of portfolio risk is then formally defined. The concepts of a risk...

The recent evolution of prudential regulation establishes a new requirement for banks and supervisors to perform reverse stress test exercises in their risk assessment processes, aimed at detecting default or near-default scenarios. We propose a reverse stress test methodology based on a...