Individual financial systems can be understood as very specific configurations of certain key elements. Often these configurations remain unchanged for decades. We hypothesize that there is a specific relationship between key elements, namely that of complementarity. Thus, complementarity seems...

We propose a unified structural credit risk model incorporating insolvency, recovery and rollover risks. The firm finances itself mainly by issuing short- and long-term debt. Short-term debt can have either a discrete or a more realistic staggered tenor structure. We show that a unique threshold...

We consider the problem of assessing and mitigating fire sales risk for banks under partial information. Using data from the European Banking Authority's stress tests, we consider the matrix of asset holdings of different banks. We first analyse fire sales risk under both full and partial...

This paper studies the dynamic risk management of highly-levered financial institutions within a structural model of credit risk. We consider a context in which systemic default induces externalities that amplify the private cost of financial distress. This represents a source of strategic...

Systemic risk - the possibility that an individual firm's failure will result in broad damages to the economy as a whole - is the epitome of financial crisis. Bailouts of troubled firms have long been the standard response to systemic risk. Yet, bailouts suffer from problems of political...

We consider the problem faced by an investor who must liquidate a given basket of assets over a finite time horizon. The investor's goal is to maximize the expected utility of the sales revenues over a class of adaptive strategies. We assume that the investor's utility has constant absolute risk...

Distance to default (DTD) is a strong predictor of default risk derived from structural models. This paper specifies a stressed version of DTD ("stressed DTD'') to measure time-varying corporate default risk in the event that a systematic stress scenario occurs. Compared with the ordinary DTD,...

Cost stickiness measures the degree of suboptimal cost reduction in response to a decline in a firm's activity. This study examines the role of institutional monitoring in addressing the value-decreasing cost-stickiness problem exhibited in many firms. Using alternative proxies for institutional...

Credit card portfolios represent a significant component of the balance sheets of the largest US banks. The charge‐off rate in this asset class increased drastically during the Great Recession. The recent economic downturn offers a unique opportunity to analyze the performance of credit risk...