I study how liquidity management affects fragility, or vulnerability to fund flows, in mutual funds and their underlying assets. Using the SEC Rule on mutual fund liquidity risk management in 2016 as an exogenous shock, I show that mutual funds which mainly invest in illiquid assets shift their...

Currently financial stress test simulations that take into account multiple interacting contagion mechanisms are conditional on a specific, subjectively imposed stress-scenario. Eigenvalue-based approaches, in contrast, provide a scenario-independent measure of systemic stability, but only...

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...

VaR_Delta-Normal fails in two counts: subadditivity and potentially producing losses larger than its portfolio value. This paper solves the second inconsistency developing formulas derived from a put option, named PVaR_Delta-Normal and Put_Expected_Shortfall, PSF_Delta-Normal; the latter also...

This article confirms the existence of substantial economies of scale in trading and post-trading financial market infrastructures (FMI), using the panel data of thirty stock exchanges, twenty-nine clearing houses, and twenty-three central securities depositories from thirty-six countries. We...

Following the Pension Protection Act of 2006, there was a sharp increase in the use of TDFs as default investment options in defined contribution retirement plans. We document large differences in realized TDF returns and risk profiles, even for funds with the same target retirement date. Using...

We develop a model of manipulation of indexes, whose components are illiquid in that they require fair valuation based on comparable instruments. Such an index may be susceptible to manipulation since distorting the prices of only a few assets could potentially shift its value. Our model...

Banks and other financial institutions which were too-big-to-fail (TBTF) played a central role during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. The present article lays out how misguided policies enabled banks to grow both in size as well as in complexity and therefore acquire TBTF status,...

Solvency II has one standard equity solvency capital requirement for type 1 or developed market stocks (39 percent) and one for type 2 or emerging market stocks (49 percent). As such, differences in financial economic risk of stock portfolios within developed or emerging markets do not influence...

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...