This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 6, "The role of capital regulation in bank supervision." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was...

Shortcomings make credit VaR estimates an unsuitable basis for setting bank regulatory capital requirements. If, alternatively, banks are required to issue subordinated debt that has a minimum market value and maximum acceptable probability of default, banks must set their equity capital in a...

Advocates for internal model-based capital regulation argue that this approach will reduce costs and remove distortions that are created by rules-based capital regulations. These claims are examined using a Merton-style model of deposit insurance. Analysis shows that internal model-based capital...

This paper revisits the debate on the securities transaction tax (STT). The analysis uses Tobin's (1984) taxonomy of financial market efficiency to examine the potential effects of such a tax and concludes that a STT probably would not enhance the overall functioning of financial markets....

This study assesses the state of the policy debate that surrounds the Federal regulation of margin requirements. A relatively comprehensive review of the literature finds on undisputed evidence that supports the hypothesis that margin requirements can be used to control stock return volatility...

Value-at-Risk (VaR) models often are used to estimate the equity investment that is required to limit the default rate on funding debt. Typical VaR "buffer stock" capital calculations produce biased estimates. To ensure accuracy, VaR must be modified by: (1) measuring loss relative to initial...

This paper considers characteristics of the capital requirements proposed in The New Basel Capital Accord (2001). Formal analysis identifies calibration features that could give rise to unintended consequences that may include: concentration of credit risk in institutions that are less well...

We measure the effect of bank failures on economic growth using data from 1900 to 1930, a period without active government stabilization policies and several severe banking crises. VAR model estimates suggest bank failures have long-lasting negative effects on economic growth. A bank failure...

Conditional value at risk (CoVaR) and marginal expected shortfall (MES) have been proposed as stock return based measures of the systemic risk created by individual financial institutions even though the literature provides no formal hypothesis test for detecting systemic risk. Our conclusion is...

The failure of the largest banks will not generally endanger the solvency of their parent bank holding companies (BHCs), preventing the secretary of the Treasury from using single point of entry (SPOE).