The Basel capital framework plays an important role in risk management by linking a bank's minimum capital requirements to the riskiness of its assets. Nevertheless, the risk estimates underlying these calculations may be imperfect, and it appears that a cyclical bias in measures of...

The Capital Assistance Program (CAP) was created by the U.S. government in February 2009 to provide backup capital to large financial institutions unable to raise sufficient capital from private investors. Under the terms of the CAP, a participating bank receives contingent capital by issuing...

During the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve implemented a series of extraordinary and unconventional policies to alleviate the impact of the crisis on financial markets and the economy. In this paper, we examine the effects of these policies on broad financial market conditions,...

We propose a tractable, model-based stress-testing framework where the solvency risks, funding liquidity risks and market risks of banks are intertwined. We highlight how coordination failure between a bank's creditors and adverse selection in the secondary market for the bank's assets interact,...

The paper puts the outcome during the most recent financial crisis in a historical perspective by taking a closer look at the frequency of extreme events in the economic history of Denmark, in some cases based on time series back to the late 1600s. We focus on the frequency distribution of a...

We explore the capital structure and governance of a mortgage-insuring securitization utility operating with government reinsurance for systemic or “tail” risk. The structure we propose for the replacement of the GSEs focuses on aligning incentives for appropriate pricing and transfer of...

We analyze the emergence of systemic risk in a network model of interconnected bank balance sheets. The model incorporates multiple sources of systemic risk, including size of financial institutions, direct exposure from interbank lendings, and asset fire sales. We suggest a new macroprudential...

The interbank market is important for the efficient functioning of the financial system, transmission of monetary policy and therefore ultimately the real economy. In particular, it facilitates banks' liquidity management. This paper aims at extending the literature which views interbank markets...

How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...

We develop an operational model of information contagion and show how it may be integrated into a mainstream, top-down, stress-testing framework to quantify systemic risk. The key transmission mechanism is a two-way interaction between the beliefs of secondary market investors and the...