Extending a standard credit-risk model illustrates that a single factor can drive both expected losses and the extent to which they may be exceeded in extreme scenarios, ie "unexpected losses." This leads us to develop a framework for forecasting these losses jointly. In an application to...

We study a unique experiment to examine the importance of rating agencies' private information for bank shareholders. On July 20, 2011, Fitch Ratings refined their bank standalone ratings, which measure intrinsic financial strength, from a 9-point to a 21-point scale. This refinement did not...

We use tools of extreme value theory to extract information about rare events from market prices. We find that such information contributes materially to measures of banks' systemic importance. These measures exhibit strong and intuitive relationships with simple characteristics of banks'...

The three major rating agencies are reassessing banks' credit risk in the light of the recent crisis. So far, this has resulted in material downgrades, especially of European and US institutions, and increased agreement about banks' overall level of creditworthiness and their greater dependence...

Is systematic monetary policy a driver of the forward premium puzzle, i.e. the tendency of high interest-rate currencies to appreciate, thus strongly violating Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP)? We address this question by studying a battery of monetary policy rules in a small open economy that is...