The purpose of this paper is to clarify the difference between the mainstream and Keynesian understandings of uncertainty which persists in spite of superficial similarities. It is argued that the difference stems from the mainstream habit of thinking in terms of a full-information benchmark,...

In spite of superficial similarities, the way in which uncertainty is understood as a feature of the crisis by mainstream economics is very different from Keynesian fundamental uncertainty. The difference stems from the mainstream habit of thinking in terms of a full-information benchmark, where...

In this paper we: (i) provide a model of endogenous risk intolerance and serve aggregate demand contractions following a large (non-financial) shock; and (ii) demonstrate the effectiveness of Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) in addressing these contractions. The key mechanism stems from...

Structural vector autoregressive analysis aims to trace the contemporaneous linkages among (macroeconomic) variables back to underlying orthogonal structural shocks. In homoskedastic Gaussian models the identification of these linkages deserves external and typically notdata-based information....

For markets to work efficiently, buyers and sellers must be able to transact easily. People must have access to a marketplace such as a supermarket or a stock exchange with adequate liquidity. Further, people must have confidence that such a well-functioning marketplace will also exist in the...

Why does the market discipline that banks face seem too weak during good times and too strong during bad times? This paper shows that using rollover risk as a disciplining device is effective only if all banks face purely idiosyncratic risk. However, if banks' assets are correlated, a two-sided...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach on how to estimate systemic risk and identify its key determinants. For all US financial companies with publicly traded equity options, we extract their option-implied value-at-risks (VaRs) and measure the spillover effects between individual company...

We propose the realized systemic risk beta as a measure for financial companies' contribution to systemic risk given network interdependence between firms' tail risk exposures. Conditional on statistically pre-identified network spillover effects and market as well as balance sheet information,...

The paper explores incentives created by the German Bank Restructuring Act for investors holding assets in systemically important banks (SIBs). Its purpose is to examine consequences that follow for risk choices of SIBs, as well as for Germany's financial system. Applying the analytical model of...

The recent financial crisis has raised numerous questions about the accuracy of value-at-risk (VaR) as a tool to quantify extreme losses. In this paper we develop data-driven VaR approaches that are based on the principle of optimal combination and that provide robust and precise VaR forecasts...