In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, policymakers in the United States and elsewhere have adopted stress testing as a central tool for supervising large, complex, financial institutions and promoting financial stability. Although supervisory stress testing may confer substantial...

We find evidence that the Federal Reserve stress tests (CCAR and DFAST) produce information about the stress-tested firms as well as other, non-stress-tested banking companies. Although standard event studies do not always show abnormal returns for the stress-tested sample on average, we argue...

Stress testing has recently become a critical risk management and capital planning tool for large financial institutions and their supervisors around the world. However, the one prior U.S. experience tying stress test results to capital requirements was a spectacular failure: the Office of...

The United States is now committed to using two relatively sophisticated approaches to measuring capital adequacy: Basel III and stress tests. This paper shows how stress testing could mitigate weaknesses in the way Basel III measures credit and interest rate risk, the way it measures bank...

During banking crises, regulators must decide between bailouts or liquidations,neither of which are publicly popular. A comprehensive assessment of regulators,however, requires examining all their decisions against regulators’ objectives of preserving financial stability while discouraging...

How can the public assess the performance of regulators who administer the resolution of troubled banks? Economic theory indicates that regulators best serve the public interest when they act to discourage moral hazard and preserve channels of financial intermediation. I study the resolution of...

Bank failures began to rise in 2007 and more than 350 were closed by the end of 2011. A number of observers have asserted that the ability of banks to switch among competing supervisors was an important contributing factor, but the issue has not been carefully investigated in empirical work....

In this paper, we study the impact of extreme events on the loan portfolios of the Greek banking system. These portfolios are grouped into three separate groups based on the size of the bank to which they belong, in particular, large, medium, and small size. A series of extreme scenarios was...

This article describes the background, design choices and particular details of stress tests used as part of an overall supervisory regime; that is, their formal integration into the process of the ongoing prudential supervision of banks and other large financial institutions. We then describe...

Since the conference version of this report in February 2011, bank stress tests have been almost continuously in the news. In the United States, the Dodd-Frank Act mandates annual stress tests for key institutions. In early 2011, the Federal Reserve conducted the first test under the Act on...