This paper discusses the role of the credit rating agencies during the recent financial crises. In particular, it examines whether the agencies can add to the dynamics of emerging market crises. Academics and investors often argue that sovereign credit ratings are responsible for pronounced...

Heavy tails and volatility clusters are both stylized facts of financial returns that destabilize markets. The former are extreme events by definition and the latter can accelerate adverse market developments. This work disentangles the two sources and examines which one does the greater damage...

The Basel II Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one or more risk models to measure Value-at-Risk (VaR). The risk estimates of...

In this study, we compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of several modern Value-at- Risk (VaR) estimators derived from extreme value theory (EVT). Specifically, in a multi-asset study covering 30 years of stock, bond, commodity and currency market data, we analyse the accuracy of the...

We model and measure simultaneous large losses of the market value of insurers to understand the impact of shocks on the insurance sector. The downside risk of insurers is explicitly modelled by common and idiosyncratic risk factors. Since reinsurance is important for the capacity of insurers,...

The paper reports the outcome of the stress-testing of liquidity risk in the TARGET2 payment system, with the study having been conducted by an ad-hoc group composed of operators and overseers of TARGET2. The study aims to assess the resilience of the system, defined as the network of its...

M-PRESS-CreditRisk is a new top-down macro stress testing framework that can help supervisors gauge banks' capital adequacy related to credit risk. For the first time, it combines calibration of microprudential capital requirements and macroprudential buffers in a unified, coherent framework....