In this paper we present a methodology of model-based calibration of additional capital needed in an interconnected financial system to minimize potential contagion losses. Building on ideas from combinatorial optimization tailored to controlling contagion in case of complete information about...

We identify and track over time the factors that make the financial system vulnerable to fire sales by constructing an index of aggregate vulnerability. The index starts increasing quickly in 2004, before most other major systemic risk measures, and triples by 2008. The fire-sale-specific...

This paper explores the implications of systemic risk in Credit Structured Finance (CSF). Risk measurement issues loomed large during the 2007-08 financial crisis, as the massive, unprecedented number of downgrades of AAA senior bond tranches inflicted severe losses on banks, calling into...

This paper explores the implications of systemic risk in Credit Structured Finance (CSF). Risk measurement issues loomed large during the 2007-08 financial crisis, as the massive, unprecedented number of downgrades of AAA senior bond tranches inflicted severe losses on banks, calling into...

Credit score cutoff rules result in very similar potential borrowers being treated differently by mortgage lenders. Recent research has used variation induced by these rules to investigate the connection between securitization and lender moral hazard in the recent financial crisis. However, the...

Mortgage originators use credit score cutoff rules to determine how carefully to screen loan applicants. Recent research has hypothesized that these cutoff rules result from a securitization rule of thumb. Under this theory, an observed jump in defaults at the cutoff would imply that...

The global financial crisis has been the prompt for a complete rethink of financial stability and policies for achieving it. Over the course of the better part of a decade, a deep and wide-ranging international regulatory reform effort has been under way, as great as any since the Great...

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of credit information sharing on bank-specific stock price crash risk. Using a sample of 1,402 listed-banks in 55 countries for the period 2005-2013, we show that credit information sharing through public credit registries is negatively associated...

Many observers have argued that credit default swaps contributed significantly to the credit crisis. Of particular concern to these observers are that credit default swaps trade in the largely unregulated over-the-counter market as bilateral contracts involving counter-party risk and that they...

This editorial, which mirrors Bruce Jacobs's book Too Smart for Our Own Good: Ingenious Investment Strategies, Illusions of Safety, and Market Crashes, finds that “free-lunch” strategies and products that promise to increase returns while reducing risk can attract substantial investments and...