Financial institutions have both investors and customers. Investors, such as those who invest in stocks and bonds or private/public-sector guarantors of institutions, expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return in exchange for the financing and risk-bearing that they provide. Customers of a...

We study a competitive banking sector in which banks choose the level of risk of their asset portfolios and, upon the public disclosure of stress test results, raise funding by promising investors a repayment. We show that competition forces banks to choose risky assets so as to promise...

In this paper, we study the optimal credit rating system in an economy where agents need to borrow and have incentives to renege on debt repayments. We show that credit exclusion creates soft collateral in the form of a borrower's reputation. Compared with individual lending, bank lending...

We consider an optimal risk-sensitive portfolio allocation problem accounting for the possibility of cascading defaults. Default events have an impact on the distress state of the surviving stocks in the portfolio. We study the recursive system of non-Lipschitz quasi-linear parabolic HJB-PDEs...

We explore a model of the interaction between banks and outside investors in which the ability of banks to issue inside money (short-term liabilities believed to be convertible into currency at par) can generate a collapse in asset prices and widespread bank insolvency. The banks and investors...

The regulatory use of banks' internal models makes capital requirements more risk-sensitive but invites regulatory arbitrage. I develop a framework to study bank regulation with strategic selection of risk models. A bank supervisor can discourage arbitrage by auditing risk models, and implements...

Empirical evidence suggests that widespread financial distress, by disrupting enforcement of credit contracts, can be self-propagatory and adversely affect the supply of credit. We propose a unifying theory that models the interplay between enforcement, borrower default decisions, and the...

We test whether ratings are comparable across asset classes over a 30-year sample. We examine default rates by initial rating, accuracy ratios, migration metrics, instantaneous upgrade and downgrade intensities, and rating changes over bonds' entire lives in multivariate regressions. These...