Traditionally, regulation of banks has focused on the riskentailed in bank loans. Loans are typically nontradedassets. In recent years, another component of bank assetshas become increasingly important: assets actively tradedin the financial markets.1 These assets form the “tradingbook” of a...

In regulating the market risk exposure of banks, the approach taken to date is (in either the Standard or the Value-at-Risk methodology) to use a 'hard-link' regime that sets a fixed relation between exposure and capital requirement exogenously. A new 'Pre-commitment' approach (PCA) proposes the...

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 4, "Incentive-compatible regulations: views on the precommitment approach." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on...

This paper studies the role of diversification in reducing the volatility of corporate bond returns induced by changes in credit spreads. Specifically, it looks at how credit risk can be diminished when a portfolio is diversified across countries, industry sectors, maturities, seniority types...