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...

Banks' leverage choices represent a delicate balancing act. Credit discipline argues for more leverage, while balance-sheet opacity and ease of asset substitution argue for less. Meanwhile, regulatory safety nets promote ex post financial stability, but also create perverse incentives for banks...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

Banks' leverage choices represent a delicate balancing act. Credit discipline argues for more leverage, while balance-sheet opacity and ease of asset substitution argue for less. Meanwhile, regulatory safety nets promote ex post financial stability, but also create perverse incentives for banks...

This paper identifies bank-specific-characteristics and market conditions that contribute to determine prices and demand for liquidity in the interbank market as wells as banks' access to this market. Results indicate that riskier banks pay higher prices and borrow less liquidity, concurrent...

During 2008, the sudden widening of credit spreads led to a rapid decrease in the value of many financial assets, revealing a general shortage of capital for many financial institutions, with some critical peaks that required fund injection and public bailouts.The evidence of a substantial...

This paper examines what happens to mortgages in the subprime mortgage market once foreclosure proceeding are initiated. A multinominial logit model that allows for the interdependence of the possible outcomes or risks (cure, partial cure, paid off, and real estate owned) through the correlation...

Changes in collateralization have been implicated in significant default (or near-default) events during the financial crisis, most notably with AIG. We have developed a framework for quantifying this effect based on moving between Merton-type and Black-Cox-type structural default models. Our...

In this paper, we empirically explore risk premia in mortgage covered bond markets. Using a large panel data set of covered bond asset swap spreads, we study the impact of different legal and economic environments. Conducting an in-depth analysis of this market, we find significant but small...