Central to the ongoing development of practical financial risk management methods is recognition of the fact that asset return volatility is often forecastable. Although there is no single horizon relevant for financial risk management, most would agree that in many situations the relevant...

This paper examines the performance of the leading methods for setting capital requirements for securities firms' trading books. Tests are conducted on a large sample of UK equity market makers' books over a substantial number of periods of equity market stress from 1985 to 1995. The...

This is the second chapter of a book, Financial Regulation in the Global Economy, Herring is writing with Robert Litan. In this chapter they show how technological advances - dramatic reductions in transportation, telecommunications and computation costs - are creating an increasingly integrated...

We study currency risk management in the context of scenario analysis. We develop scenario-based optimization models that jointly determine the portfolio composition and the hedging strategy within each currency. Thus the model prescribes optimal selective hedging policies. We then study...

The recent wave of bank mergers has raised concern with its effect on competition. This paper examines the influence of concentration and merger activity on consumer loan interest rates. It uses Bank Rate Monitor, Inc. survey data on loan rates quoted weekly by large commercial banks in ten...

Traditional explanations of market crashes rely on the collapse of an asset price bubble or the exacerbation of an information asymmetry sufficient to cause less-informed participants to withdraw from the market. We show that markets can crash even though asset prices have not deviated from...

The role of the insurance industry in the retirement assets market is examined. The popular image of the industry as one in decline is scrutinized by drawing upon various governmental and industry data sources.<p> <p>Our examination begins with the traditional area of corporate pensions, specifically,...</p></p>

We study the relation between market returns and aggregate flow into U.S. equity funds, using daily flow data. The concurrent daily relation is positive. Our tests show that this concurrent relation reflects flow and institutional trading affecting returns. This daily relation is similar in...

Improvements in the technological infra-structure have freed financial institutions from many of the constraints of geography. Yet when courts are asked to determine liability after some event interferes with the payment of an international bank deposit, they often fall back on the notion of...

This study examines how interest rates and interest-rate exposures affect the level of acquisition activity, the identities of targets and acquirers, and the pricing of acquisitions in the banking industry. Using a sample of 477 large mergers from 1980 to 1994, we find that the level of...